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Dan Wells

The Apocalypse Guard

Part One: The Plural of Apocalypse

Chapter One

Emma's Instructions for Starting a Book:

1) Start with something exciting, to get the reader's attention.

2) Don't start with a blog post. Like this one.

3) Crap. Let me start over.

Smoke in the air, a red sky, huddling alone in the ruins of a dying world. (See, that's better already.) My name is Emma, by the way. Yes, that Emma, from Emma's Instructions. But unless you're one of the six people who follows me on Snapgram, that probably doesn't mean anything to you. So, let me introduce myself. I'm eighteen years old. I'm from <Idaho>, sort of. And I just realized that I got totally off track again. What happened to the red sky and the dying world? Well, let me tell you.

Remember how I'm only sort of from <Idaho>? I've lived there since I was two, but I was born in a place called <Ard>, which is basically like a different version of <Idaho>, but in an alternate reality? And if you're reading this, you need to know about alternate realities. There's Earth. And then there's an infinite number of different worlds that are kind of like Earth, but also different. Sometimes a little, and sometimes a lot. Like there's one called <Hona> that's mostly the same as the world you know, except instead of continents it's all islands. Even <Idaho> is an island in a giant North American archipelago. Crazy, huh? So there's <Hona>, and there's Terra, and there's <Erodan> and <Pangaea>, and a bunch of others. And there used to be an <Ard>, but it's gone now. Because I called it a dying world before, but that was sixteen years ago. Today, it is all the way dead. Burned to a crisp. And I almost burned with it, except that the Apocalypse Guard swooped in and saved me.

Holy crap, the Apocalypse Guard! Why didn't I start with them?

Emma's Instructions for Starting a Book Correctly:

1) Start with something exciting to get the reader's attention.

2) Like, for example, if your story includes a group of amazing heroes who travel the multiverse saving entire worlds from destruction, maybe lead with that.

3) I mean, come on.

The Apocalypse Guard are based on Earth, but they hop around from world to world stopping Apocalypses. Apocalypsi? Apocaleeps? That word doesn't even have a plural, because why would you ever need to talk about more than one Apocalypse? Most people just get one, and then boom, you're done. That's what an Apocalypse is. But the Apocalypse Guard can actually stop Apocalypses, and they've already stopped a bunch of them and now we're in <Erodan> to stop a giant asteroid and it's AMAZING.

Important Note: did you see how I casually dropped that "we" in there? Now "we're" in <Erodan>? That's because I'M TOTALLY A MEMBER OF THE APOCALYPSE GUARD AND I CAME HERE TO STOP AN ASTEROID! (I know it's kind of lame to type in caps lock like that, but seriously, if you were in the Apocalypse Guard traveling to a different dimension to stop a giant asteroid, you'd totally put it in your Snapgram, too, and I would not say anything about your excited over-use of caps lock because I am a good friend.

Which is also why I am going to stop talking about myself and start telling you the story about how we saved <Erodan>.

Starting right now.

I was standing in the Apocalypse Guard command center, looking up at the screens that showed the giant asteroid hurtling down toward the planet when Commander Visco signalled that it was time for me to do my part.

"Emma," she said, and waved her coffee mug toward me. "I'm empty again."

Okay, so my part is very small.

"Yes, sir!" I seized the Commander's mug and hurried over to the small kitchen beside the command center. I mean, I was only eighteen, and fresh out of high school; it's not like I was gonna be out there flying around in a power rig, draining kinetic energy from an extinction-level space rock. I was a cadet! And this was still very early in my training, so coffee was all they let me do.

One pot of coffee was already brewing on the counter, but we had about forty people in the command center, each with their own station and responsibility. So I got a second pot going, just in case. To tell you the truth, I was a coffee-making genius. Which is weird, because I don't drink coffee. I'm not just from <Idaho>; I'm from <Iona, Idaho>. Population 1,803, approximately 1,802 of whom are in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, including me. So I don't drink coffee, but you know what I can do? I can follow instructions. It's practically a superpower. Though, I guess if you followed me on Snapgram, you already knew that.

Emma's Instructions for Perfect Coffee:

1) Follow the freaking recipe.

2) Serve it way hotter than you think it should be.

3) Never talk about how bad it smells.

I know a lot of people love the smell of coffee, but they're wrong. You call it an acquired taste; I call it Stockholm Syndrome.

"You don't have to read the recipe every single time you brew a pot," said Sophie, jogging up with a few empty mugs of her own. She was a cadet, like me, and was mostly just a coffee girl, like me. "Trust me," she said, "I've been drinking coffee for years and I..."

She caught a whiff of the pot I had just filled, and her eyes closed in aromatic pleasure. "Wow, that smells amazing!"

"Thank you," I said and smiled. What did I tell you? Coffee. Making. Genius. When you read the manual and follow the rules and measure things exactly, it will always turn out better than if you just do something by instinct. Always.

I gave Sophie a fist-bump of cadet solidarity, filled Commander Visco's mug, and rushed back into the command center. I said before that we were on <Erodan>, but that's "we" in the communal sense. We, the Apocalypse Guard, had a presence in <Erodan>. When most think of the Apocalypse Guard, they think of the Power Riggers, and their fantastical abilities. And yes, a bunch of those people were on <Erodan> and up in orbit around it, fighting the asteroid. The rest of us, the operators, scientists, engineers, medics, Commanders, janitors, accountants, and cadets were back on Earth using something called a dimensional tunneler to communicate with the Riggers.

We were doing it from an orbital space station, though, which is still pretty friggin' rad, huh? I love this job.

I gave Commander Visco her steaming mug of coffee and took the opportunity to look over her shoulder at the room's main screen, currently showing a view of the asteroid. One of our technicians had named the asteroid "Droppy." Which was why we didn't usually let our technicians name things.

Dan Wells

Who here is a big Brandon Sanderson fan? We've talked about doing weird collaborations forever. We actually did one. And if you are a big Brandon fan, you have probably heard about a book called The Apocalypse Guard. Which is one that he's been working on for a while, and he eventually came to me and is like, "This is broken! Help me fix it!" So I came in, and I fixed some of it. And we went back and forth and we did a few revisions, and we got to the point where everything's working except the magic system. And I'm not the a-hole that's gonna change a Brandon Sanderson magic system. So it's on the back shelf until we get a chance to go through and have him do another pass. But I'm gonna read a little bit of the first chapter to you right now.

Questioner

When is the next Alcatraz book coming?

Brandon Sanderson

Very close. Very close. Last draft. I wrote half, Janci is writing half. And she just did her last revision. So now I just have to read through and do my last revision, and we'll be ready.

Questioner

As far as the Lord Ruler goes, how did he use the Twinborn thing? Feruchemy and Allomancy?

Brandon Sanderson

What he had to figure out how to do is: Allomancy is powered by Spiritual power directly from the Shard of Adonalsium. Whereas Feruchemy is powered by your own Investiture and effort being transferred into the thing. What he needed to do was figure out a way to power Feruchemy with Allomantic power, right? You could have done the same thing by fueling it with the Dor, or with Stormlight, or another external. But he only had access to three magics. So what he had to do was figure out that.

So what he's doing is, he's basically taking metals, (since he's a Feruchemist and an allomancers), and he is burning metals that he has Invested himself, but then using... basically, switching it so he gets a burst of Allomantic power that is charged with a Feruchemical attribute. So it's powering Feruchemy with Allomancy by burning the metal that he himself has Invested.

Questioner

So he was essentially putting stuff into the metal?

Brandon Sanderson

Basically, priming the pump. He puts it in with Feruchemy. Then he burns it with Allomancy. But that fuels Feruchemy with Allomancy, which allows him to draw on the powers of the Shards, rather than himself. So it's not really a perpetual motion machine, because he's drawing the power from someone else. But it's external, which allows him to break the rules of Feruchemy.

The big question I have is: that works in the book, because you can dig into the technicalities of the book. But that's not gonna work in the movie, right? That explanation right there, that's so many levels over the heads of the audience. So I have to figure out a way to not break the cosmere magic, but make it simpler to understand in the movie. Which is the big headache in writing the screenplay. That's probably the biggest challenge in the screenplay is to figure out how to make that all work.

Questioner

Quick question on aluminum. Why does it affect other forms of Investiture?

Brandon Sanderson

When I was building the cosmere, I just had to build certain themes into it, and metal was one of those. And the metals have kind of a Spiritual integrity, and Spiritual component, that if I can get into Dragonsteel explaining why, you'll get your kind of origins.

Questioner

And that's why, in Warbreaker, metals are different with Awakening, and stuff.

Brandon Sanderson

And even in Roshar, the cages that you're building for fabrials, once you start to figure out how those metals affect it, you'll be like, "Oh wait, that makes sense!" And these are just across the cosmere.

And if you want an in-world answer, it has to do with stuff in Dragonsteel. But really, the answer is, I was building this and I'm like, "I just want this to be a theme. So I'm just going to give this Spiritual component to metals." So it works in Mistborn, and it works all across everything.

Questioner

When you write too much, how do you know what to keep?

Brandon Sanderson

It depends on the given scene. When I'm trimming down description, I'm using looking for: am I repetitious? Am I breaking the flow? If I'm not being repetitious and breaking the flow, I leave it. If I'm breaking the pacing and the flow of this chapter, or if I'm just saying the same thing too much, that's where I take an axe to it. It's when I'm trying to make it more specific and shorter by condensing it, usually.

Questioner

Elves and goblins and orcs have all gone out of style. But why is it that dragons haven't? Why do you think?

Brandon Sanderson

I think that orcs and elves and things were so directly associated with Tolkien (even though Tolkien had dragons, too), while dragons were a much broader association. So, I think because elves and halflings were associated with Tolkien, got really associated with roleplaying, then got associated with a certain sub-brand of sci-fi/fantasy... Dragons somehow escaped that because they were larger than Tolkien. Elves technically were, too, but the ones we use in fantasy are very directly related to Tolkien elves. And these things are cyclical with those. But dragons haven't; that's just because, like I said, they were part of the collective unconsciousness. There were dragon books before Tolkien. But there weren't hobbit books before Tolkien.

Tempestuous

What's the process of making a map? How much info does Brandon give, and how much do you adapt it to yourself?

Isaac Stewart

I think there's a lot of give-and-take on our maps, really. You give me a lot of freedom. And really, I just come up with something nowadays that fits once I've read the book, and then we just adjust from there until it matches, it works for you and it works for me.

Brandon Sanderson

Knowing that I don't have to do all of that, there's one thing that I can basically outsource, right? There's somebody I trust who is able to do a really good job with this. Frees my brain to think about other things. These days, I just let Isaac work his magic, and know that, at times, I'm going to have to revise the text to actually make it fit.

Isaac Stewart

We do that sometimes. If we get a piece of art that somebody did something cool in it, but it wasn't necessarily in the book, but we like it, he'll oftentimes go and change the description a little bit to match, if we think it works a little better.

Brandon Sanderson

I did that for the Elantris cover, way back when Stephan Mantiniere gave me the cover. I was like, "Ooh, readers would ask 'Where is this cover scene?'" So I actually put the cover scene into the book.

Questioner

Will we be getting Shallan's sketches in color [in the tenth anniversary Stormlight leatherbounds].

Isaac Stewart

The answer is "kind of." We will be doing those in two color.

Brandon Sanderson

There was never any talk of doing the sketchbook pages in color, because Shallan didn't do them in color. It would look really odd for those to be in color. And the thing that drew me to Ben McSweeney doing them, when I originally hired him before Isaac even worked for me, was his line art. I like his sketchy line art. And I would not want to do those...

We are going to have a bunch of full-color pieces.

Isaac Stewart

There's also limitations with how many colored pieces you can put in a volume. One of them is however many signatures are in the book (how many packets of these [pages], you can only put color pieces in between those. So if you have nine signatures in a book, you're limited to nine pieces, for example. So we were limited to that. And there are, like Brandon said, like 30 pieces of art in the book. If we did all full color on that, we wouldn't be able to print the book. They wouldn't be able to do that for us.

Ashton Smith

I just finished the Legion series and it was amazing. Do you ever think you'll go back to it?

Brandon Sanderson

So what my pitch for Legion has always been is me wanting to do a television show. When I conceived the very first Legion story, I wrote a series Bible to go along with it and this never has materialized. Now, it is still optioned by someone. It's our third or fourth option on it, which means that there is a company out there called Cineflix who has the option to make a television show, and as far as I know they are still developing that and hoping they can make that happen. But after a decade of trying to get a television show made, and realizing that I just don't have the resources to do this on my own, I have instead decided let's try doing an audio drama series using Stephen Leeds and his aspects. So we actually got together a little writers' room. Myself and a friend of mine that I started an audiobook company with. Max Epstein is my friend, and together we have an audiobook company called Mainframe, and we have been developing various projects with various people, mostly with me kind of trying to kick off things that'll feel more like television shows but audio dramas, and Legion is one of those. So if you really liked Legion, when we release that audiobook version, which theoretically we're going to do an audio original Legion thing that would be like a pilot for a series that we would do other audio dramas for, with a writers' room, just like a television show. If that comes out, give it a listen, and if you like it, let us know and let whoever we end up putting it with know so that we can continue doing them. So there's a decent chance that there will be a Legion one manifesting.

Mario

Do you prefer one of your books to be adapted into a live-action series or an animated series?

Brandon Sanderson

I would take either, fairly equally balanced depending on how much of a push I thought it was going to get and how comfortable I was with the creative team that would be joining me and making it. So there is a big push toward animation right now that I think there'll be some opportunities for, but we have also some very nice things happening in the film department, like I am most of the way through my own take on a Mistborn film treatment and I'm going to be looking for partners on that. And over the last couple of years I've made some really nice friends in Hollywood that I'm hoping will be interested in helping me make that happen. Of course, the hardest part of making a film, which is why despite fifteen years of selling options and things, never getting one made is, is somebody's gotta put up $200 million to make the thing, and that's a lot of money. So if you feel like paying $200 million for my film, go ahead and let me know.

M

What areas in your writing are you still focusing on improving, if any?

Brandon Sanderson

I would say that there's a continual struggle for all authors I know to be more active and less passive in their writing. To be showing more and telling less, and this is like a lifetime quest for authors to just be thinking of better ways, more active ways to get information across on the pages. So I'm still working on that, most certainly. Specifically, I feel that the weakest area of my stories is generally the prose. I don't think I'm terrible at it, but I also think that I repeat the same phrases too often, and these sorts of things. So prose has been a major focus for me over recent years, and it's something that I hope to continue to keep focusing on. Those are my main areas.

Obviously, whenever I write a book, one of the things I do is I pick something I want to do a little better. Like, in Oathbringer one of my focuses was "let's do a more wide variety of viewpoints," which is why I did an entire section that saw a bunch of different viewpoints from the different members of Bridge Four and me trying very hard to make those viewpoints distinctive and interesting. Each book has a little mini-focus.

Questioner

Can one person speak the oaths of more than one order of the Knights Radiant?

Brandon Sanderson

That is a RAFO. It is theoretically possible, but we'll RAFO anything else about that.

Many People

Wondering if we're ever gonna see a Cosmere coloring book?

Isaac Stewart

We've talked about this. I think that it's within the realm of possibility, but I don't want to promise anything at this. Because, again, it comes down to this whole opportunity cost thing, where do we want to spend our time. But I can see it happening. I just don't know.

Brandon Sanderson

We want to eventually do some worldbooks for some of the series, like a nice world guide for Roshar. But those take a lot of effort, and we have seen some of those turn out very poorly for other worlds and book series, so we're not sure when and if we will do that.

Isaac Stewart

We've learned, especially on Cosmere things, that we need to be heavily involved on those sorts of things, or things can move away from where we want it. So we would have to be involved with this, so it would need to be during a time when we're not preparing for, like, a Stormlight book. Because that's highest priority.

Brandon Sanderson

I would imagine, that if we release a Cosmere art book, that it will be after Book 5.

Zeke3dt

What is a piece of art that you've made for the Cosmere that you like, but that was never used and likely never will?

Isaac Stewart

I have tons of little sketches and things of symbols that I would count. And I don't know if I have a favorite in there, but I can tell a story about when we were doing the Cosmere symbol. Because we did a ton of different ideas with that. And for a while there... when we do symbols, I do books full of symbols; I want to find something iconic. I'll immerse myself in symbology for a while. And I was kind of thinking we haven't used something with a hand, so I was coming up with these stylized hands for a while that had different things on them. But the logo, it was just getting too complex, and it wasn't falling all together all that well. But I have these cool drawings of symbolic hands, like the hands idea which is one of the things in our world which is very similar to that. Kind of drawing on that sort of iconography the way that Robert Jordan drew on the wheel and the worm Ouroboros and things like that.

Isaac Stewart

I just got sketches for Herald Pailiah. I don't know what we've said about her in the past, but she is the Herald who is over the Order of the Truthwatchers. Her symbol is the one on the chart of The Way of Kings that is green, it's emerald, it looks like furling grass. So the Herald, there's some beautiful things going on with nature in the background with this one.

Brandon Sanderson

If you're like, "Who are all these people, Brandon?" They are mostly going to be in the back five Stormlight books.

Brandon Sanderson

The Heralds, like I said, we want these Sistine Chapel type paintings of the ten Heralds in-world to make as our endpages. And you got four of them in Oathbringer. But there's ten Heralds. So we've been working, slowly over time, collecting pictures from people we really want to work with, who we think would do really good jobs. And we started on these pretty early, because we wanted to find when people had openings in their schedule, of just artists we wanted to work with.

And it was earlier last year, almost a year now, that we got Taln in. And it is gorgeous. And we've got the actual, physical painting. With these, we're buying them all, the physical painting. If they'll sell them; Dan Dos Santos won't sell us his yet. He likes them too much, which we will not push him on that. But we have Jezrien and we have Vev upstairs.

So, yeah, we've got the Taln painting that Isaac is going to grab from you. And he'll do the reveal of who did that, and things like that. But it is one of the best fantasy/science fiction artists of all time.

This will be for Rhythm of War. (If indeed that is the title. Because we haven't officially announced it, yet.)

Isaac Stewart

This is Taln. This will be one of our endpapers at some point for one of the books. Probably this one, but it might not be. I've hired out for the rest of them, so it just depends on what fits the tone of the book.

This is by Donato [Giancola]. And Donato has been amazing to work with. You've probably seen his stuff for The Lord of the Rings. He's done stuff for George Martin. He's done space stuff.

Brandon Sanderson

I have always wanted to own a Donato. He actually did an art piece for us very early in my career for a short story, but it was digital-only, so I couldn't buy it.

Brandon Sanderson

The process on this was, we have these briefs that I write up about each of the heralds. I go into our wiki, I pull out the lore, things that haven't been revealed. I put it all together, and I send out what I'm allowed to to the artist. Which is usually most of it. And then I say the whole thing about, "These are kind of like the Sistine Chapel paintings, and all of the apostles. These are something from the Renaissance of this world, where they have done Vorin representations of the ten Heralds."

So, on this one, I sent him Taln. We know that Taln (especially we know this from Oathbringer) is the one who held the Darkness back, he held the Desolations at bay for thousands of years, something like that. So what we have here, Donato interpreted that as Taln stepping forth out of Damnation with this representation of Damnation in the background.

What else can I say about this? He used our symbols for the Stonewards. We've got some of those in this. We've got our numbers; the Stonewards are number nine, so we've got the Vorin numeral nine in there. The sword, he took that from descriptions of the sword where it's kind of this large, molten nail. Anyway, we're just happy with how this turned out. He only did one revision on it for us, because we didn't need more.

Brandon Sanderson

The publisher who's doing Isaac [Stewart]'s Monsters Don't Wear Underpants book came to use and said, "Hey, we really like this story in Oathbringer of The Girl Who Looked Up." And they said, "We think this would make a nice children's book." And Isaac knows way more about children's books than I do. And he suggested it needs some revisions to actually work as a children's book. And I suggested some revisions. And he's like, "These probably aren't actually going to work for the children's book." And he suggested some revisions which did work. And so I just said, "Isaac, you just take it over." So it's going to be co-authored by us. The first thing that's, like, officially co-authored. (Except we did get the Nicki Savage story.)

Theoretically, we will sometime... still years away. But we'll have a picture book of The Girl Who Looked Up that takes my writing from the book, Isaac adapts it so it works as a children's book, and then art directs hiring out to get the artwork done. So that will be the first thing you can actually buy from the both of us.

Isaac Stewart

Probably, yeah. I think we're looking (and it may have been in the State of the Sanderson) some time in 2021. It really depends on when the art and when the writing comes together. But we're in the middle of that process right now.

Brandon Sanderson

I've warned Isaac that Book Four has a really good one that'll work pretty well, as well.

Isaac Stewart

If we ever see the Nicki Savage stories, one of the actors who played Vin shows up. On stage.

Brandon Sanderson

If you want to read some of Isaac's writing, he wrote the Nicki Savage story in the broadsheets.

Isaac Stewart

The broadsheets in Shadows of Self and the broadsheets for Bands of Mourning were probably 95% me.

Brandon Sanderson

I wrote the Allomancer Jak one in the first one. And the second one is Allomancer Jak also, but you wrote it. And then you wrote Nicki Savage, which is Allomancer Jak's protege. And we still kind of want to do a Nicki Savage novel, at some point. Isaac wants to do it. Isaac is one of the only people on the planet... like, I'm happy doing collaborations on non-Cosmere stuff with my other writer friends, but the Cosmere is so intricate that most people cannot write in it, we don't think. We even had trouble with the White Sand graphic novel. We had a fantastic novel on that, but they just weren't steeped in the cosmere in the way they needed to be. If there's ever writing to be done in the Cosmere that I can't do, it's probably going to Isaac, if he wants to.

Isaac Stewart

It'll go through all the same process to make sure that it's canonical.

Questioner

What is the process for you to create a symbol or map for a book?

Isaac Stewart

Both of those have kind of a different process. If you look at the overview, the process is the same, and it's the same process that a lot of time is used for plotting the book, where you start macro and then go down to the micro level. So, I'll talk about each of those separately.

For a symbol, it's usually Brandon coming to me and saying, "We need a symbol for this series." Or I realize we need a symbol for this series. Let's say the Nalthis one. We just came up with that, we put it on the spine of the Warbreaker leatherbound.

So we said, "We don't have a symbol for Nalthis. What do we want that to be?" And I talked to Brandon, and we said, "Maybe a symbol of the Tears of Edgli." And so, we talk about, "What are the Tears of Edgli? What do we know that's canonical? What do you have in your head?" And we kind of came up with a story about them. And then I just start drawing.

Brandon Sanderson

So, if you don't know what these, the Tears of Edgli are flowers that they get a specific dye for that are briefly mentioned in the books. But they are where the Shardpool is in Warbreaker. So it's actually pretty relevant, although in the first book, it doesn't actually pop up all that much. But they are Invested flowers, basically.

Isaac Stewart

So we thought that would be a good symbol for the world of Nalthis, you take one of its Investitures and make that into a symbol. So I draw a bunch of flowers at this point, and we say, "What looks cool? What is going to be symbolic?" So you can see there's five lobes sticking up, five lobes sticking down. There are references to the number five in this book that have different meanings. Like the Five Scholars, and there was five something else. Anyway. So you'll see that one is sticking up, and one is sticking down. And there's more symbolism in that, as well.

But I do a bunch of symbols, I show them to Brandon, and I say, "Okay, which ones of these do you like? What don't you like?" And then we narrow it down. And then I iterate on that, and I do another version where we get a little bit closer. And once we get it close in the sketch realm, I take it into Illustrator, make some nice vectors so it can print out really well on the foil or as we're doing decals or different things like that.

Another thing that I have in the back of my mind when I'm making is symbols is that I want them to be cool. Because we've noticed (and this was not something I noticed early on), but I noticed people will want to get stickers and put them on their laptops. Or they'll want to get them tattooed. And if somebody's gonna do something permanent like that, I want them to be cool. So that's something that's always in the back of my head, is: "This has got to look cool, in case somebody wants to tattoo it on themselves. I don't want to responsible for something dumb."

Brandon Sanderson

A lot of you may know I served a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in Korea, in Seoul. And missionaries have one day off a week, basically they call it P-Day. It's not a full day off, but it's basically a day off. Preparation Day. It's very common that missionaries will go play basketball or something. I'm not a sports fan; I appreciate sports. So I bought this sketchbook, because I wanted something that I could write in while watching my companions play basketball. And this is White Sand, my first novel. Handwritten. In '95 on these sheets of paper. And you can see me crossing things out, doing revisions, making my own kind of little dotted line here to do a scene separation, and stuff like this. And I just filled these things. With these tiny things. I can still read it.

"He wants you to visit him today?" Kenton repeated. "Who?"

"Regent. The Tower Seat."

I wanted you guys to see this. If there's ever a Brandon Sanderson museum, that needs to go in it. And that's how I wrote my entire first novel that I ever finished. Though, I didn't have a lot of time. One day a week. I didn't finish it those two years on my mission.

I came back and got a job. And the job was selling ties in a kiosk in the mall in Idaho Falls, Idaho. Because, while i was raised in Lincoln, Nebraska, my parents moved to Idaho while I was away on my mission. So I came back to a job selling ties. And it was actually a pretty good job, but you could only talk to people if they came up and started looking at your kiosk. Which was great; I'm not going to have to bother people; if they are interested, I can help them. But that also left me a lot of downtime to work on the stories. I had that. I also had a second job, which was selling corn out of a truck by the side of the road. (These are the great things my parents had lined up for me, when I got back.) And both of those left me time to keep working on the book. And then I eventually got it all done and typed it out and had my first novel finished. I think I finished typing that out after I'd gone back to BYU, and I finished the book. So, really, it took me from about '95 until '98 to write my first book. But part of that time was only one day a week.

Clarity1

How do you and Ben McSweeney collaborate on making illustrations for the Stormlight books? Does Brandon give you the ideas first, or do you both come up with your own concepts for your art?

Isaac Stewart

We're starting to settle into a way that this works with Ben, me, and Brandon. And it's usually that Brandon will say, "Hey, Isaac, this is what I'm thinking about for the book. I want to have this many pieces of plants, this many pieces of animals," whatever it may be. And he'll oftentimes tell me what those things are. I will give descriptions to Ben McSweeney. If they are hard descriptions, then we'll say, "Ben, we're kind of thinking we need something like this," and then he has a lot more leeway on those particular items. So, right now, we're working on some spren pieces. Ben has been drawing different kinds of spren.

Brandon Sanderson

Basically how all the Radiant spren look in Shadesmar, and in the Physical Realm. That's what Shallan's gonna be sketching for us in the next book.

Isaac Stewart

And then there's been some things where Brandon has told us, "This is what it's like," but he doesn't say what the clothing is like. So Ben will go on his experience on what he's read in the books, and he'll come up with something, and then we say yea or nay. And most of the times, we will go with some variation of what Ben has done. On these latest ones, there's only been one that we've really had to go back on and say "give us another concept," but that just speaks to how good Ben is.

Brandon Sanderson

He's really in tune with these books. I usually have an idea of what I want Ben to do. And you usually have some leeway to do the things you want to do. Like, if we go to Oathbringer, I would have said, "Here's the couple things I'm planning for Ben." He does the bulk of the art. He does the Shallan sketchbook pages. But then Isaac came back and said, "I think I want to do this thing with the wines," or "I want to do this thing with how you write glyphs."

Isaac Stewart

Mythica, I don't remember if you or I came up with that idea. But I read the book, and then I just make notes, and then I come to Brandon and I say, "These are the ones you want. Here are some other ideas; what do you think is good for fleshing things out for this book?"

Brandon Sanderson

We have never found a place for the Ten Fools, have we? We've bumped that one from Words of Radiance, to Oathbringer, and still haven't done it yet.

Isaac Stewart

Yeah, we don't know if it will even be in [Stormlight Four], either. But eventually, we'll get there.

I'm at the beginning of that process for Stormlight Four. I can tell you that we will have a second page of glyphs from Nazh, from his time in the ardentia.

Evelyn Basher

Have you ever written something you regret because it misrepresented your personal values in books?

Brandon Sanderson

An example of violence being over the line actually got cut. This comes from Oathbringer, and it's during one of Dalinar's flashback sequences. And there is a sequence where, to not give too many spoilers, he ends up trapped beneath an avalanche of stone. And I wrote a scene where he comes out, he is consumed by the Thrill, and he goes to town on the people who are trying to kill him in some really graphic ways. (For me. Like, nothing maybe compared to what George [Martin] will write. But for me.) Man, there were heads being crushed, and stuff like this. I wrote this, and it was the mindset I was getting into, being Dalinar. And I got done, and I actually didn't come back to it until I was in the writing group, and the writing group was like, "Woah. We know Dalinar was brutal, but Woah! Do we have to see all this?" And I thought, "Wow, no. We don't have to see all this. I'm gonna trim that down." I can still release it online, if people want to see it. We'll try to get Adam to get a deleted scene of that put up, if you really want to see Dalinar go to town on a bunch of people. But, in this case, I'm like, "This just felt wrong" when I was going back to it. I went over a line I didn't want to cross in the level of brutality in the book. And this is not to be a commentary on anyone else's lines. You may hear this and be like, "Oh man, I wish that were in the book." But the books are a representation of what I want them to be. So, that's an example of when I went over the line.

I do think the initial painting of Ash, in the front of Oathbringer, ended up... her clothing ended up being more transparent than I had realized when we were looking at the artwork. We asked a bunch of artists to paint, for the Heralds, basically the version of Sistine Chapel that might exist on Roshar, the ten Heralds represented instead of the prophets at the sides of the Sistine Chapel. And Dan Dos Santos is an amazing artist, and he painted an amazing picture of Ash, and I saw it, and Isaac's like, "Do you think this is a little too risque to put in the front of our book?" And I thought, "No, I don't think it is," because I was looking at the slit on her dress, and I'm like "Ah, it's fine." I wasn't realizing that he was saying, "Hey, this is transparent, and you can see kind of more than perhaps you might want to be seeing." And the book came out, and people were like, "Hey, why is there a naked woman in the front cover of your book?" Now, again, some of you may be saying, "Really? Brandon, that is super tame." And this all kind of depends on your own worldview, and things like that. I remember hearing a cool story once about speeding, where a comedian said, "Isn't it funny that anyone going slower than you is someone you're like, 'That's such a slow person! How come they can't just go the right speed? That person is terrible!' But anyone who passes you? You're like, 'That person's a maniac. Look at how fast they're going!' It doesn't really matter how fast you're going. You're still going to have this inclination that anyone going slower than you is obstructing the flow of traffic, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac that is going to cause bodily harm to everyone around them." Obviously, not 100% true. But it rang true with me. And I feel like that's how this sort of thing goes. And for me, Ash's outfit was too transparent. And we talked to Dan and said, "Can you just make the dress a little less transparent." And he's like, "Oh yeah, sure, absolutely." Had no problem with it. And in the second printing, the dress was where we would like it. Which still, to some people, is probably too transparent. And to other people, you're like, "You silly Mormon. Why do you even care about this?" But it is part of my moral compass, and so I want to release the books where I feel comfortable.

Questioner

What was the hardest decision you've had to make as an art director?

Isaac Stewart

A hard decision that we had to make was with the Warbreaker endpapers. Dan Dos Santos gave us, like, six different sketches, and they were all gorgeous. And we had to make a decision based on that. Some of them were better pieces of art, if you were to just hang them in an art gallery. And some of them worked better for the book. And we chose what worked better for the book, which were still gorgeous. But there were some there that I think would have made really great pieces of art on their own. That was a hard decision.

Brandon Sanderson

That's always hard. When we get the sketches from the artists saying, "Here are the five cool things I can do." And we're like, "I want you to do all of these!" But we don't have space for all of them.

Isaac Stewart

Most of the time, everything they send is great, and it makes it really difficult to decide on that.

I'd have to think about if if it was, like, a heavy difficult decision. But usually, it's the everyday "good, good, or better" pieces of art.

Many People

Inquiring about the sequel to The Rithmatist.

Brandon Sanderson

There's a couple things going on with The Rithmatist that make it difficult. The first one is that The Rithmatist was the book series I was working on when The Wheel of Time came along, and it is the biggest casualty of The Wheel of Time, in that when The Wheel of Time came along I dropped everything else. And a lot of authors have this issue. If you do a book, and then your career changes dramatically, it can be sometimes very hard to go back to that book and kind of recapture who you were back in that time. It's sometimes really hard to go back and capture who you were. When I tried to go back to the Ritmatist sequel, I had that problem. It was this sense of, "I have to make sure this sequel fits with the first one."

Now, I'm going to be doing this with Elantris sequels pretty soon. (Pretty soon in Cosmere writing terms, which means in five years or something, probably. After Stormlight Five.) So I will have to kind of learn how to do it. But when I went back, and I had a shot to do Rithmatist 2, years later. Like, Rithmatist was written in 2007, and then we sat on it for years, because I knew getting to a sequel was gonna be hard for me. And finally, Tor's just like, "We need to release this book." And I said, "Okay, we need to release this book." And I wish I had had the foresight to go back and change the ending a little bit so it didn't promise quite so much in a sequel. I do still intend to do one, but it was just really hard to get back into it.

And then there's some other things. Any time you're dealing with real world history, it requires a level of sensitivity that, particularly in the first book, I was not as aware of when I was writing during that part of my career. And I wrote some things that I now consider insensitive towards some Native American cultures. They aren't a big part of The Rithmatist, but they are there. So that puts The Rithmatist in this place where, if I go back to it, I need to be a little more aware of what I'm doing. It's rough, because it's alternate history, so there are things that I am changing about our history. But there are also things that I can change about our history that are insensitive to do. And, like I said, I don't think it is a thing that really ruins Rithmatist, but it's there when I see it now, and I'm like "Uh." I can do a better job, and I should. But that also means that I can't just rush into a sequel. So I want to be careful when I write that sequel, and be aware of what I'm doing.

So, this will happen. But I don't know when. And I can't promise when. Because both of those issues make it difficult for me to get back to it, and have repeatedly made it difficult for me to get back to it.

LupusAstaris

Is there any specific instance where you hid something in one of your books that only other Mormons would recognize?

Brandon Sanderson

No, I don't really do this that much. Because my heritage and my faith are both LDS, there are certain things that other people have come to me and said, "Hey, was this influenced by your religion?" I'm like, "Ha, yeah, probably was." But I didn't sit down and hide things in there. Most of those are, people notice it and come to me and I'm like "Yeah, that probably did come from that." I'm sure there are some things.

Like, you asked specifically for members of the church, but there is a point in the Wheel of Time where Rand basically quotes a line in the Bible where God basically says, "Before all these other people, I AM. I existed then; I still exist." And one of the things that Jim liked to do was put references to Rand kind of echoing or fulfilling or starting mythological things that you can find in many different religions. And I put this thing where he says, "Before Lews Therin was, I am," into the Wheel of Time. That was less to be an Easter egg, and more because it's the sort of the thing that Robert Jordan did, and I wanted a few of those. Of course, I also have Rand perform one of the Buddha's famous miracles, which is being able to release both fire and ice from his body at the same time, which is one of the famous things of Siddhartha, the Buddha. So I was just kind of looking for things like that to put into the Wheel of Time for Rand.

But I'm drawing a blank on this. I'm sure there are some things that I've written that come from my heritage, that as I wrote them I'm like "Oh yeah, that's kind of like this," and that other people would notice. But I don't hide things like that, generally.

Brent Mulvey

Would you let Magic: The Gathering do a Stormlight Archive series expansion?

Brandon Sanderson

Yes, absolutely. It is one of my dreams. In fact, I've been really excited to see them doing now... they're only Hasbro properties, which Magic is owned by parent company Hasbro, but they're doing some of this. They did some Transformers card; they even have their own kind of new Transformers game that is tied in with Magic, like it's compatible with Magic but has its own rules and things, which I think is really cool. And they did some My Little Pony cards. Which we made sure to get, because we have some Ponies fans in house at Dragonsteel here, and they were for charity. And so, if they were ever interested, at all, then I would jump at the chance.

Now, I don't know how likely that is, because in these days, the philosophy for a lot of companies (which is a pretty wise philosophy, and Magic is one of them) is: build your own IP, rather than relying on someone else's IP. And Wizards of the Coast has experience with this. They have made in the past (and lost) the rights to various different IPs, including the Pokemon card game, and I think they did the Star Wars one for a while. And I can see how it would smart to have access to this, to do all this work on something, and then just have the license lapse and get pulled from you. And you would say, "You know what? I would rather just make my own." And they are pretty good at making their own.

So, if there were a chance to do this, I would absolutely jump at it. It would be one of my dreams, to have it happen, because it is my favorite game. But I'm also not holding my breath, and I'm not going to be offended if this is not something that they ever want to do.

Cosmere.es

How was Perfect State born? Will you come back to develop the idea?

Brandon Sanderson

Perfect State grew out of me wanting to... a lot of the classic sort of cyberpunk idea, Matrix sort of idea, is: we live in a simulation, and this is just a terrible thing. And that's a pretty cool story, right? I don't know that I would want to discover I'm in a simulation. But, as often is the origin of some of my stories, I am thinking about, "Well, can I reverse that trope? What if living in a simulation, there was a really good reason for us to do it, and it actually turned out pretty well?" The idea of being: we solve overpopulation by giving everybody their own perfect place to live, in which they get to be some sort of cool hero and/or political figure. That felt like it was a cool thing to explore, where the story was not talking about how terrible this was, but was instead talking about the natural problems that arise. And I consider those two different things. Like, if I espouse a specific political philosophy (not to make this political), it is not me saying that political philosophy is without problems. (Because it probably is.) It is just I feel like the problems that philosophy has are ones that I would rather deal with, and are easier to deal with, than the problems another political philosophy might have. So, with Perfect State, the point of the story was not, "Hey, this would be perfect!" (Even though it's called Perfect State. That's kind of the irony of the title, right?) It's that "This is gonna have some problems. Let's explore what those problems would be and how the people who live in the system deal with it."

I could see myself coming back. Like, the two main characters of the story definitely have different goals and philosophies, and that is not resolved at the end of the story, even though the story itself is resolved. So I can see coming back even to those same characters. But there's a lot on my plate, so I can't promise when or if. I do know where the story would go. But that's very common for me.

Stubble McShave

You say that fantasy can be any genre, with dragons. However, you've never had dragons in your book. Can you see yourself putting some classical fantasy monsters into your fiction?

Brandon Sanderson

Yeah. There are dragons in the cosmere. The very second Cosmere book I wrote was called Dragonsteel. Dragons are the one classical fantasy thing that will make an appearance in the cosmere. You haven't seen any dragons that actually look like dragons in any of the books yet. Because dragons in the cosmere are shapeshifters in kind of the classic D&D trope style of thing.

John Dean

Inquiring about the possibility of new things coming to the Reckoners world?

Brandon Sanderson

Actually, yes, I am working on something new with the Reckoners right now, that I can't quite announce yet, but it is likely to be audio original. I think I talked a little bit about that in State of the Sanderson.

Kai Ellie

If you bonded a spren, what do you think its personality would be like?

Brandon Sanderson

Boy, I have no idea. I like it when spren contrast. So it would probably be hyper-emotional, would be my guess. 'Cause it would make for better storytelling that way.

Emma Mensinger

How did you decide the forms that spren will take when they appear? For example, rainspren looking like melted candles?

Brandon Sanderson

Part of this is just, I wanted interesting visuals. Part of this is kind of playing a little with mythology. So, the spren started as personifications of weather, and things like that. The earliest version of Syl, she was just the personification of the East Wind, and there were four Winds, which is a very classic idea. And that evolved over time into all of these spren taking a little more of a shinto approach to it than a classical Greek mythology approach to it, where it started. But a lot of these were then me looking for things that would be bizarre, interesting visuals, and somehow reinforce what I was trying to do.

For example, rainspren are a great example. The way they stare up and look like a candle are both reinforcements. During the Weeping, when they are most common, spheres stop working, and you've gotta start using candles. The way they stare at the sky unblinking, it's unnatural. You're staring at the sky, and the rain hits your eyeball, you're going to blink. And they just look up at it, and I like that kind of contrast, that dissonance.

Blaine Lasarr

How did you decide which human personality aspects to assign to Shards? I feel like there's a real-life story here.

Brandon Sanderson

It's a little less real-life story, and a little more like how I divided up the metals in Mistborn. More along the lines of, "I need each of these emotions or attributes to be distinctive, and I need each of the characters, the Vessels, to be distinctive who hold them." And so, because I am building sixteen of these things, it means that I have to do a lot of work to make them all individual, and things like this. And my worldbuilding in that area was less along the lines of "story I had in my life causing me to do this" and more "man, I have to do sixteen of these, let's try to make them all distinctive. No, those two seem too similar; let's do a different one there." And lots of trial and error along those lines.

Austin Alager

How much of the cosmere did you plan ahead when you started? What advice would you give for writing an extended universe, aside from making each book stand on its own?

Brandon Sanderson

You've got the most important one there already, so good for you.

I did not have most of the cosmere (in fact, any of the cosmere) really ready when I wrote Elantris. I have a big advantage in that my early books were terrible and didn't get published, and so when I did get published, I knew what I was doing, I had already written a bunch of these books, I had already started putting them in the same universe, and I was able to do a reboot, basically, from the beginning by releasing Elantris and Mistborn. If those early books had been published, then the cosmere would be a lot less cohesive than it is, because I was able to say, "Wow, someone bought Elantris (which was the first book I wrote back in the Cosmere sequence, back before I really knew it was going to be the Cosmere sequence)." When I put the pool in, I had no idea what the pool was. I just put it in. I'm like, "This is a cool thing. I'll figure out what to do with it." But, by the time I was writing Mistborn, I had put pools into things like Aether of Night, and I had the whole of Adonalsium (I came up with that while writing Dragonsteel, which was the book I wrote after Elantris). So, it was really fortunate that I was able to basically do a reboot and restart continuity by publishing Elantris and then writing the Mistborn trilogy, knowing by then about the whole cosmere and things like that.

John Robert Dax Dyson

Where did the inspiration for Kaladin's fighting style came from?

Brandon Sanderson

Classic spearman fighting is based off of rank and file spear formations. Nothing too spectacular. I did mix it with a little bit of Eastern spear-fighting, specifically some Chinese spear-fighting, but really your classic spear-fighting technique is pretty multicultural, what you're gonna want to do with a spear. I add flourishes, which come more from katas now and than than they do from actual real-world fighting.

Though a good resource for this is Matt Easton's channel on YouTube, Schola Gladiatoria, because what he will do is he will have people doing historical martial arts, and they will do ten bouts of a person with a spear versus a person with a spear. Most of these are European, but spear-fighting tends to be pretty similar across cultures. And just watching some short spear fights, or spear versus sword... I specifically watched a bunch of those bouts for Adolin's spear-versus-knife fight that we had in Oathbringer. Just really handy, the fact that he films large bouts like that and puts them on the internet.

Stephen Kundy

If you were to write Elantris now, with all the writing experience that you've gained over your career, would you change anything?

Brandon Sanderson

Yeah, there are a lot of things I would change about Elantris. I have an autistic character in Elantris that I did not do a very good job with. It's more of a pop science version of autism than it is an actual in-depth look at what it is to live with autism. My prose is pretty rough, back then. Prose has never been my strongest suit, granted, but I do think I've gotten a lot better over the last twenty years. (Published fifteen, but twenty years ago, I wrote it.) I think my prose has improved dramatically over the years, and I think my ability to do dialogue has improved, and a lot of things like that.

Would I change any major plot features of Elantris? No. I'm actually fairly pleased with Elantris, plot-wise. There are aspects to it, right? I mean, Raoden's character arc is primarily externally driven. He is not a character who is going through a big change internally. But that was intentional. When I sat down to write it, the book I had written right before was about a deep and angsty character who had one of these very, very dramatic character arcs. And I was tired of angst, and I wanted somebody who dealt with external pressure in a fantastic way and was put into a very extreme situation externally and was someone who was kind of a little more like me in that that didn't really faze him, and he did his best with the situation. And I like that aspect of it. It does mean that some people who read it think Raoden isn't as deep as someone like Kaladin. Which you are perfectly fine in thinking that, but I think they are just different types of characters. I wasn't trying to write somebody angsty in Raoden, and I am pleased with how he turned out.

Sarene, as a character, was always kind of me trying to write someone who was a little more confident than they, perhaps, deserved to be. And that's a personality trait of Sarene. I actually, when I was plotting Stormlight, I once described Jasnah to someone in my writing group as "the person that Sarene thinks she is." And I like that about Sarene. She's young. She's got gumption and grit. And she's not quite as capable as she thinks she is, but you know what? Thinking you're capable can get you a long ways, as long as you have a minimum level of capability. And she does.

And I'm very proud of Hrathen as an antagonist. It has taken me until The Way of Kings and Taravangian to find someone that I feel is as strong an antagonist as Hrathen from my very first book. I'm still very pleased with how he turned out.

Dante015

If you were basing a magic system in part on real-world physics or chemistry, how far down the rabbit hole of science would you go at making it?

Brandon Sanderson

Most of mine are based on real-world science and physics, but with a hefty dose of fantasy.

The Rosharan magic systems are based on the fundamental forces, right? That's where they started. That's not where they ended, right? You can really only recognize gravitation from the fundamental forces as actually still being a thing in the Rosharan magic system. But the idea of fundamental forces. I'm like, "Well, what would the weak force look like as a magic system?" And I just kind of went crazy off from that.

So, I tend to use the real-world physics as a very squishy springboard from which I go some direction off on some weird tangent and come up with a magic system. Allomancy was based, in part, off of vector physics. But, I mean, I write fantasy. I do not write hard science fiction.

And so, if I were gonna take one and really try to stay close, then I could see myself going pretty deeply down the rabbit hole. But then, I just kind of ask myself, "What am I breaking? What am I changing? What am I trying to achieve? What's the affect I'm going for in doing this?"

Untamed Banana

I'm very curious about who writes the Ars Arcanum?

Brandon Sanderson

Ars Arcanum are all written by Khriss. She is a character from White Sand, which was my first novel. Never got published, but we did the graphic novel versions of it. She appears on-screen at a party with Wax in the third Wax and Wayne book. She dances with him.

Dylan

If you could have one of your characters made as an android and unleashed upon the world, who would it be?

Brandon Sanderson

That's an interesting phrasing.

Lift. Unleash Lift upon the world, and see what she does.

Aurora

If you had to choose a creature from Roshar to be your pet, what would it be?

Brandon Sanderson

It would be a larkin, obviously. This was the little beasty that was given to Rysn in the second book. They are very cool in that they feed on Investiture, and that turns out to be a really handy power to have. If you're not going to have magic of your own in the cosmere, then having the ability to eat other people's magic is really handy. Plus, they are the closest thing that I've had appear on-screen in a non-humanoid form to a dragon so far in the books. They're little lizard wasp dragons. Yeah, wasp-dragon, I would say, is what a larkin is. And that would be a really cool thing to have.

Bruno Veil Fernandez

Which character had an easy concept, but was harder to translate onto paper?

Brandon Sanderson

Sazed was harder to translate to paper. I often go back to him, because his arc in the third Mistborn book is one of the hardest that I've ever writen. It took a lot of revision. And on paper, it was pretty easy. "Character gets depression, because everything he's believed in turns out to potentially be a sham." That is really hard to write. Turns out that a mental affliction that encourages you to not get out of bed, not do anything, and tries to push you to be inactive meshes really poorly with trying to write characters in a novel. Getting depression right can often be soul-crushing for the reader and really boring, which is quite a challenge, because we do want to get it right if we're going to include characters with depression. But, at the same time, a person who has trouble getting out of bed every day can wear on you to read. And it's one of those things where being realistic adds a whole host of challenges.

And my advice, if you are doing this, is to make sure that there is either some external force forcing them to keep going, or some sort of sense of progression, even if it's downward progression, that the reader can watch and feel a sense of motion to the character's arc.

Eric Culver

How do you feel about fans naming their kids after your characters? My wife knows two people with kids named Kaladin?

Brandon Sanderson

I find it a mark of great respect and honor that people are naming kids after my characters. It also means that, maybe, some of my names aren't terrible. My very first book, Elantris, when I published it. Elantris was the book where I kind of went out there with my linguistics. And several of the reviewers noticed. They were like, "These names are just so hard to say and so weird. Sanderson needs to calm down on the naming!" So, when people name their kids after characters then I'm like, "Oh, good. At least they're not so weird that people won't name their kids after them."

It's really cool. I remember when I met my first Rand, my first Perrin, which both happened before I was working on The Wheel of Time. It's always been really cool to me. I like it. I like meeting Arwens. I wish that fantasy names were a little more frequent in our society. I think that they're very cool.

So, it's awesome. I will try to live up to the respect you have shown me by naming children after my characters.

Glen Castergene

Where did you research addiction, and what made you put a character into your books who was battling addiction?

Brandon Sanderson

So, this character that was battling addiction actually started, first appearance was in Mythwalker, which is the book that became Warbreaker. It was my ninth novel. (During those days, for those who don't know, I wrote thirteen before I sold one.) This character really stuck with me; it was me trying to do something that is very different from my own personal experience, looking to try to make a character sympathetic who struggles with something that a lot of people struggle with in our world. And one of my goals in putting characters like this into my books is to try to help humanize, because we all have these issues we deal with, and we all have different things to our psychology, and some of them can be pretty difficult to deal with. Some mental illness can just be a real kick to the head. And I see a lot of fiction that does a poor job of humanizing people like this.

And this was a character that, when I wrote him, I didn't know what I was doing, but the character really connected with me. And so, I put the character back in, I added them to the Stormlight Archive, and then I started to do my research. You can read, in the acknowledgements, some of the people that have been very helpful in me understanding addiction to the point that I hope I can get it right in the stories. But it is really important to me. There was something about writing this character that made me understand addiction, and people who were dealing with addiction, in a way I hadn't before. And that's something that I love about writing.

The other thing is, I didn't want magic to become a panacea, to get rid of hard things in people's lives. That's kind of important to me, because I think it can be very dangerous to write, "Well, the way to get over this sort of thing is just to get some magical powers!" (Which, of course, doesn't work in real life, in the real world.) And I don't want to not give people who deal with things like this the escapism that some of us will get my being able to read a book about someone who has a magical cure to an affliction they're dealing with. That is part of why they read, is this ability to escape from our problems into a world where the problems become different, and perhaps more surmountable. I acknowledge that what I'm doing does make that difficult, but I feel like the humanizing of people who are, maybe, not psychonormative or who deal with serious issues like addiction is more important to me.

And the writing felt right. At the end of the day, there's all these reasons that we can give for why I do things, that are intellectual reasons. But at the end of the day, it just feels right. The characters I'm writing feel like themselves, and that's who they are. And to not write them well would be a betrayal of trying to tell this character's story.

Deana Whitney

Why aren't there more pets in your worlds? Will we get more in future books?

Brandon Sanderson

One of the reasons there aren't more pets is because my main series is The Stormlight Archive, and there's just not room for both spren as companions and pets. They kind of lfill a similar roll. You can say, for the same reason, we don't have them in Elantris. And in Mistborn, we basically have OreSeur the wolfhound filling that role. And so, I kind of slotted into that role in the story these sapient companions to the main characters. And there're just too many things to juggle sometimes by adding too many (even characters that are obviously just pets) into stories.

Now, that doesn't mean I won't do it now and then, but that's the main reason you're not seeing as many. But, I mean, you could argue that the aviar are pets. But you could also argue that they're not, that they are these sapient companions, because aviar have more than animal intelligence. But, at least I've written a couple of stories with pet-like entities.

Aaron

What changes, if any, would you like to see in the fantasy genre for this upcoming new decade?

Brandon Sanderson

I get asked questions like this on occasion, and I do have trouble answering, because if there are changes I want to see, I just kind of do them in my writing. And it's hard for me to feel that I should speak for an entire genre, particularly one so varied as fantasy.

I have been very interested by some of the trends that have been happening lately in fantasy. I think fantasy has gone some really interesting places, with different types of stories and different types of backgrounds leading to fantasy novels. I would certainly like to see that continue. It's been very good for the genre, I believe. But I don't have, really, any axes to grind about where the fantasy genre should go. Which is very different for me now than when I was young, trying to break in.

Maybe that simply comes down to the fact that right now, I am the establishment, rather than the person looking to buck the establishment. So, for someone like me, the fantasy genre seems like it's in a great place, because people are buying my books! But, when I was young... I don't want to say I was more self-righteous, but I think in my desire to see my style of fantasy do better, I was less willing to acknowledge that, as far as taste goes, it doesn't matter what you love in stories (within normal limits), as long as they are books that people are writing with passion and you're enjoying reading, right? So, when I was younger, I might have said, "There are too many Tolkien-esque fantasies being published!" Where now, I say, "Hey, people, they like Tolkien-esque fantasies. That's great! Everybody loves Tolkien!" What's wrong with fantasy being Tolkien-esque if people enjoy it?

So, I'm much less likely to try to say what fantasy should be, and just more enjoying the fact that I feel like we have, in fantasy, the single most interesting and diverse genre on the vast face of the planet. It is the genre where anything can happen, and your imagination is unlimited. And I love that about the genre, and I certainly would like to see that continue and to see where it goes.

Timberwolves

Does the term Brightlord/Brightness have anything to do with eye color? Or is it related to the fact that money and artificial light are synonymous?

Brandon Sanderson

Yes. The problem here, answering this, does it have only to do with eye color? No, of course not. But eye color, and the fact that money glows, are both things that have been themes in Vorin culture for thousands of years now. And because of that, the two are very closely interlinked, it would be hard to pick which one is causing this and pull the other one out.

So, it is both. If you would an Alethi, they would probably say it has more to do with eye color. But culturally, the fact that money glows is just really deeply embedded into the way they think about light and the way they think about wealth and that sort of thing.

Questioner

If you had to write a nonfiction book, what topic would it be about?

Brandon Sanderson

Writing. That is a bit of a softball.

I have considered it. One of the reasons I do things like Writing Excuses and my class is because they use different parts of my brain than writing does. If I sat down to write about writing, I could just be working on one of my stories, most likely, and I'm most likely going to just start doing that, because I'm behind on everything. So, a writing book is unlikely to happen. But if it did, it would be a writing book of me talking about motivation, and stuff like that, which I don't know if anyone wants to read, but I find very fascinating.

Cody Skomauski

I've struggled with mental illness my whole life. Reading about your characters like Shallan, Kaladin, and Dalinar, that all have some degree of mental illness, start their path to recovery after forming a Nahel bond is very interesting to me. Is it a requirement for a Knight Radiant to be broken in some way prior to the bond? Where did you get this idea? Or was it just how it turned out?

Brandon Sanderson

There's a bunch of different answers to this, a variety of directions I can go. Part of it is, this is how it turned out. As I was developing the characters, I knew very early on, after the 2002 version didn't quite work, I knew what I wanted to do with Kaladin. And Shallan's character has always been a central feature of who she was, even before I came up with her modern version of the character. So there was a theme building there on its own. And when I notice a theme, I ask myself, "Is there a reason I'm looking at doing this? Why is it a theme?" And I realized this is something that was very interesting to me. I have several loved ones who have mental health issues that they deal with. It was something I didn't see done a lot in heroic or epic fantasy, and it felt very natural as a place to go. That the Knight Radiant bond is about making this bond with this spren and striving to become a better person.

It is not required in-world. A lot of people, even in-world, think that it is, because it was so common. My kind of external answer to that, even though they don't know this in-world, is that people who have struggled with these kinds of problems are more open to walking the path that one needs to walk to become a Knight Radiant. The two go hand-in-hand, the kind of self-awareness, and the ability to see yourself, to be reflective, just goes hand-in-hand with working on some of these issues. And at the same time, I felt it just worked really well with the themes of the story, the themes that Dalinar has of redemption. And also, I think that the extreme circumstances that a lot of characters put through stories like the ones I write do lead people to have some difficulties, right? Even PTSD, and things like that. There's just a lot that goes hand-in-hand together with this.

So the answer is, yes, it happened to be that way. But once I noticed it happened to be that way, I asked myself, "Is this a theme I'm doing on purpose, even if I haven't noticed it?" And the answer to that was, "Yes, it is."

Ishana92

Chapter 36: Hero

Dalinar thinking about Evi.

With that pale hair and light golden skin, she was like a glowing gemstone.

Now, maybe I am confused about Iri looks, but shouldn't it be other way around, pale skin and light golden hair?

Peter Ahlstrom

Evi is Riran, so she has blonde hair rather than actual golden. The skin here is how we might describe someone in our world that way, rather than literal golden.

Ryan

Are there any Dark Souls Easter eggs in any of your books?

Brandon Sanderson

I don't think I've put any Dark Souls Easter eggs in. Maybe I should at some point. I don't think I've intentionally -- I stay away from pop culture Easter eggs in the Cosmere books. I do do Easter eggs, but they're usually like people that are my friends and family and things like that. There's a bit of a fourth wall break that happens.

Not that I don't do it in some things. Like, the Krell are an Easter egg from Forbidden Planet. That word comes from that, which is one of my favorite old school sci-fi movies. So I do things like this all the time, but I don't go into it thinking, "I want to find an Easter egg to mention this!"

Even stuff like where Wayne is reading a book about talking bunnies, people are like, "Ooh! It's an Easter egg reference to Watership Down!" I don't really mean it to be that. I mean it to be that talking animal books are just a thing that happens in a lot of cultures, and I felt like it felt natural for this timeframe, there. It wasn't me even referencing -- I try to stay away from references to our world, but I do it on occasion, so it's a very valid question. And maybe there are some things I've done that I don't even remember doing.