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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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I [NutiketAiel] didn’t hear the question that led up to this answer, but my ears perked up when I heard Brandon say the word "Feruchemical." He said that the spiritual Feruchemical powers are "very interesting," and that in future books "mostly I’m going to play around with the different types of Twinborn."
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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If I took a fabrial to Shadesmar, would it work and what would happen to the spren trapped in it?
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RAFO.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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Is this a prequel to the "modern" trilogy? How far into the future is that? (in-world)
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There will be several "Wax and Wayne" books dealing with the next development; they're not so much "prequel" as they are a side venture into life between the first and second trilogies, but they will be used to provide some foreshadowing for the second trilogy. Incidentally, he also described the beginning of the second trilogy as "a Misting SWAT team trying to figure out how to take out a criminal Mistborn." He also said that the third trilogy will be much nearer "hard scifi" as their understanding of Allomancy and Feruchemistry enables them to develop FTL propulsion.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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Do highstorms get weaker as they move west because of normal meteorological reasons the same way a hurricane gets weaker over land or is it because they slowly drain investiture as they infuse spheres over the whole continent?
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Both. He said that anything like that will be affected by both normal science as well as the magic, but then he added that the highstorms are a natural occurring phenomenon that were on the planet before stuff started going down.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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It's National Novel Writing Month. Do you have any advice for amateur writers jumping into this endeavor?
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Yeah, NaNoWriMo. I did this for many years before I got published. I was already writing, my friends were all doing it, so I'm like, "Yeah, I'll keep going and, then I won't tell you guys my word count because then you'll feel bad." *laughter* We always had, like, a race board posted on a website, that just posted what the daily count was supposed to be. I often doubled it. So, I was like this even back then. I would say, for you, to-- Number one, don't let the word count goal intimidate you. If you don't get 50,000-- the whole goal is just to get you out of your writing comfort zone. So, for you, 25,000 is where you're going, and you actually still do that, that's fine. 50,000 isn't a novel anyway, they just say it is. I mean it is technically a novel, but I mean, how many novels are 50,000 words? There's not very many. A lot of middle grade is around 50,000 words. I would just go for it. The other thing is, have a daily habit of when you're going to write, and try to make that sacrosanct and get into this habit of, I'm writing for these two hours. And kind of unplug during those two hours and write during those two hours. Worry less about what your word count is you're hitting. Do try to not self-edit. That's the biggest thing that's gonna to help you. If you're not going back and revising and revising and revising, and you're pushing forward-- the goal is to teach yourself to finish something and to push forward and turn off your internal editor.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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What is the weirdest, strangest, most odd and possibly ridiculous magic system idea you've ever had?
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I had a really ridiculous world idea, less a magic system, that's just maybe too weird. The really weird worldbuilding idea I had was: people who live on an enormous boulder being pulled by a giant around a very large, very hot surface. And all the light comes up around. And you have to be constantly moving; the population is migratory, otherwise they'll fall off, things like that. It's not big enough to have its own gravity, but it's big enough that... Basically, you would send people ahead who plant crops. There's people planting crops, and the crops grow as you are migrating. And then you harvest them and send crops up to the people at the front, so a group of people is, like, three clans. This whole society built around which of the three you're part of, and they're always following each other. This thing, like, mulches into the surface below and brings up fresh soil that will grow plants relatively quickly, but you've got to be constantly moving. Like, it rotates ever couple of days, basically. If you sat still for two days, you would be crushed under it. That felt really cool, and also maybe just too weird for being weirdness's sake. I never ended up writing that story. But I had some interesting ideas for that. Those are the weird... really weird settings often occur to me more frequently than weird magic systems. A lot of the magic systems that don't make it into the books aren't that they're too weird; they just are dumb. Or they just never click. I haven't been able to find a sound-based, purely sound-based magic system that I like. It just doesn't write well on the page. You can do it; Pat has really great writing about music in his books, and I can write about it kind of from a scientific, technical standpoint like I do in Rhythm of War. But every time I've tried a purely sound-based magic systems, it's one of those things that sounds better (pun intended) in concept than it does work on the page. And it just ends up being one of those things that the reader can't experience, they just have to listen to characters try to explain experiencing it. Where I prefer magic systems that the reader, in a way, feels like they're experiencing. When gravity works differently for Kaladin, you could imagine how that feels, and you can put yourself there and walk on the wall and things like that. And all the music ones have been too much more abstract than that. That might be because my music theory background is wanting. I played trumpet all through high school, I took a lot of music classes and things, but I wouldn't consider myself enough of an expert to really talk about it the way that a true musician does.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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I asked for something about Honorblades that we don't already know.
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One Herald (other than Taln) kept his Honorblade (or, at least, took it back)
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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I'm not doing the [BYU] lectures as YouTube videos this time. We figure we only wanna do these every three or four years; there's no reason to do them every year. But, because of covid, I have to stream the class to all of my students. And I do apologize; it is a closed stream through the university. But we will be creating highlights out of each lecture; maybe there'll be a fifteen-minute or a thirty-minute chunk here that Adam thinks will make a good stand-on-its-own thing, and you will get to see those probably after the semester's done, whenever Adam gets them together. We're gonna be doing that from the Lair.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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You kinda talked about where you got the idea for <highstorms>, but in the Firefight -- The Reckoners series, was there a particular character you gave them their powers because you thought that power was [cool]?
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So the question is: In The Reckoners , was there a particular power that I gave to someone because I just thought that power was cool. And yeah, the tensors. They can turn things to dust. For years I'd been walking around looking at our society where we have all this metal and this wood around, and things like that. I just loved the idea of just being able to turn it to dust. Maybe it's like a "reducing things to their more primal state" or whatever-- but anyway it was one of those magics that was in my head for a while. And really superheroes are magic. I don't pretend that they're science fiction, they're magic. So I just designed these magics that feel cool to me.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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In the opening of The Emperor's Soul , I see a scene familiar to Warbreaker ; the first character we meet is in jail. Was this "connection" intentional?
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Yes and no. Originally there was a prologue which featured Hoid speaking with the main character and setting some of the plot in motion, but it was cut before final revision. Also, it's convenient to begin with a character who is already in trouble.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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Spensa comes across as overconfident and bombastic at times, while her AI sidekick, M-Bot, is both comic and tragic. What else can you tell us about developing characters?
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They really play off one another. With M-Bot, I needed both a friend and a foil for Spensa, since there's a lot of conversation between them. I also needed an outside perspective. Spensa's culture has problems. Humankind crashed on this planet decades ago, and has been subject to these alien invasions and air raids for so long, that their entire society is built around the machine of war to protect themselves. The technology and temperament revolve around getting pilots into the air at all costs, and it’s skewed everything as a result. I needed an outside voice to ask questions and raise concerns, even if it's through humor. Because Spensa is such an extreme character, one of the challenges was to depict that a person who's spent most of her life alone, hunting rats, while imagining herself to be a great warrior, is going to have a warped perspective on what it means to be a fighter pilot, weirder than the rest of the society might. In a way, she's a stand-in for someone like me, who enjoys larger-than-life action movies but has never experienced real violence. She’s like the person in the seat with the popcorn, who’s confronted by the reality and discovers it’s not what she imagined.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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Will we see Kaladin face Amaram?
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I wouldn't put such a strong conflict as that without a purpose.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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How many books will the series have?
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Two 5 book arcs.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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What are keys to balance family, writing career?
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Good question. I had to make certain hours of the day "off limits" for writing, so that I didn't feel I was missing out on writing time. I could ALWAYS be working, but that's not good emotionally or for the family. Otherwise, I try to make my writing time as effective as possible, so I don't feel that sense of "I didn't get anything done." That one makes me unbalanced, as I feel anxious if I haven't gotten some good work done in a day.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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What do you think you were able to bring to the story of Infinity Blade?
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I'm a writer. This is what I do. One thing I've noticed—and I'm a big gamer, I enjoy video games—is that a lot of video game people have great ideas. They have excellent storytelling instincts. What they don't have, often, is a lot of practice doing it—you get better at telling stories by telling stories. A lot of the video games out there will have this core of awesomeness but a little bit of roughness around the edges when it comes to dialogue, making sure that the worldbuilding is rigorous, making sure that the characterizations are smooth and have nice arcs. I think that's something I can bring expertise to. One of the nice things about video games is that it's a big collaborative effort. There are certain things that a writer like myself should not be involved in. I don't have any practice coming up with fun ways to play games. I know some writers who assume that because they know how to tell stories, they'll be able to make a game that's interesting, but that's certainly not the case. The developers at ChAIR are experts at making really fun, awesome games. But I can help them with their worldbuilding, making sure it's consistent; with their dialogue, making sure that it's both evocative and interesting without being cliched and overdone. I think that the more people with skill in various areas you have working on a project like this, the better the outcome will be.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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Two questions about the mechanics--well, actually, a bunch of questions--would a Shard's magic change if they moved to a different world?
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That's a RAFO.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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Hypothetically, if Kelsier were to meet Kaladin, what would he say?
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Probably "don't be so hard on yourself, kid." That would probably be what Kelsier says. He would do some version of "I've been there, don't be so hard on yourself. You can't fix it all." That's what my gut says. Kelsier would really like Kaladin. He's the sort of person that Kelsier just... Kelsier loves to see and recognize the people who are just innately good and trying to do good. He's drawn to that because it's not something that is natural to him, if that makes any sense. He can recognize it, though. And it's one of those things that he kind of wants to preserve in the world. And he would really like Kaladin. Probably not. But Kelsier would probably be just fine with that.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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Is Cultivation's holder still alive?
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Yes.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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So the series, people are presuming it's going to be ten books long because of a comment you've made, is that correct? Is the 1000-page format something that's going to continue throughout the series?
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That is correct; it's going to be ten books. Ten is a holy number in the series. It's related to the Order of Knights Radiant and the number of magic systems and things like this. So ten books. Each of the books will be medium long. I'm not sure...you know, I can't tell you exactly how long they will be. Instinctively, looking at my outline, I feel that the first is probably one of the longest in the series, which is a bad way to do it, honestly. You really want to have the first ones be the quick pow, and the middle ones get to be the thick, meaty ones. But I'm expecting... This one was about 400,000 words; I'm expecting them all to be around 300,000 words. There may be some that go a little bit longer. It'll depend on the book and how many characters I decide to deal with in that book, and the plot structure of the books.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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Any plans on doing anything similar with Aether of Night ?
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Any plans to do Aether of Night , which is the next best book? And really the only other one that I want people reading, because the rest kind of fall into the threshold of, yes this is not as good as my current work and it's bad. Aether of Night is two good books put together that don't intertwine very well. I'm more likely to take Aether of Night and take pieces of it, like I did with some other books, and make a new book out of it, than I am to do a graphic novel.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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If the Lord Ruler was able to enter the Well of Ascension a second time, what would he have done with its power?
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He probably would have tried to fix and tweak a few of the problems that were happening, but he had learned not to do too much. So I would say: minor tweaks, and perhaps some power solidification things, and stuff like that. He would not, probably, have been able to fix things as well as he wanted to. It probably would have gone more poorly than he implies that it would have gone.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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What color is Aimian blood?
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Good question! The question is, which type of Aimian? That would be my first response. The two different varieties have two different colors of blood.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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So, I started reading Mistborn not longer after finishing [Wheel of Time]... Why does it seem so intentional that they're a parallel? That Mistborn is set in a 4th age a cycle in either direction from Randland? Well, more the close of the 4th, beginning of the 5th, as the influence of the Dragon/HoA is ending. The Deepness is basically exactly the Dark One, what the Hero of Ages had to go through reminds me very much of Rand's tribulations, hell, his diary could have been written by Rand himself. And what did Rashek do after killing off The Hero of Ages? He became Nae'blis and quickly established unquestioned rule over the world as God-Emperor. Even how the Deepness attacked the Hero, trying to convince him he was insane, filling him with doubt that he could possibly succeed, or rule, it totally fits how the Dark One tries to break his foes rather than simply destroy them outright.
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Mistborn was inspired by my love of the classic fantasy stories from my youth, Wheel of Time at their forefront. The original idea was for a Shannara-esque fantasy epic where the heroes lost at the end, but I decided (for many reasons) this wouldn't be fun to read or write. The idea simmered for a year or two until I realized it would an awesome backstory for the heist story/epic fantasy mashup I'd been developing. And so, I worked to make Rashek's story as resonate with classic fantasy epics as I could. I wanted that resonance so that I could play with the tropes of epic fantasy. Remember, Wheel of Time was a huge influence upon me as a youth and a writer. I knew I couldn't just write ANOTHER farmboy saves the world story, as I felt those had been done (and done well.) I wanted something that had one foot in this, however, and one foot in a more contemporary style of plotting and worldbuilding. So everything you're noticing is indeed intentional. Mistborn is my vision of a world where Rand gave in. (Or where Frodo kept the ring, etc.) I wrote the trilogy primarily in 2004-2006, ending one year before I was chosen to finish the Wheel of Time, which makes the parallels even more interesting.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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Could you create a fabrial capable of showing past events using a Radiant spren and a gold cage?
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RAFO. Theorize further along those lines, but RAFO.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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If Rysn's Dawnshard is about Change or Remaking or something like, how do we refer to it? The Dawnshard of Change? The Change Dawnshard? I am asking purely from a semantic standpoint.
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I haven't honestly decided yet, Argent. I am playing with several themes for the Dawnshards even still. RAFO, I'm afraid. As I said somewhere else, this was written as it was deliberately--but also somewhat vague on purpose.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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I wonder whether Jasnah has been to the Cognitive Realm of planets other than Roshar?
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She has not, she is not horribly cosmere-aware as of the end of Oathbringer , she is starting to get an inkling. Give her some time and you might be impressed with how quickly she can come up to speed.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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Is there any iconography planned for the [Ten] Heralds? Images of them as the *inaudible*? I remember reading about statues.
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Like in what specific way? There's already some in the book. Front cover. Look at the corners. Maybe eventually. The thing is, the Heralds are... they're mythological figures of lore. So what you'll see are things like that. Those are actually large representations of them in the archways. Yes, there are statues, and so maybe eventually you will get some drawings from Shallan regarding things like that. We'll see. It's a good question, though.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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PROJECT FIVE: THE LIAR OF PARTINEL (A.K.A Dragonsteel) This was the book I was working on for a 2010 release. Epic fantasy. I wrote it in 2007, then put it aside when the WoT was offered to me. Frankly, I was never pleased with how this book turned out. It was a rough, rough draft—and though I finished it, it wasn’t really ever ‘finished.’ I’ve tossed it back into the wood chipper of my brain. I can do better, and I just can’t ask you to buy this book, as I don’t feel satisfied with it. I could revise it, but that would take about six months of work—delaying the second WoT book for six months. That’s unacceptable, particularly for a book I feel so unsatisfied with. You’ll get a revision of this someday, perhaps.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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Is there an exact date when the final book of the Alcatraz series is coming out?
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Not an exact date. It's about, at this point, about three quarters done. I wrote about half of it. And I'm cowriting the other half with a friend of mine to get the voice right. And she's up to the ending that I outlined. So we'll see how we both feel about that ending. And then maybe we'll release it this year? Maybe next year? It's pretty close, though.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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First question is about a joke - writing a book with Rothfuss with competing teams of characters, giving it to GRRM for the ending - sounds like it probably won't happen but both Sanderson and Rothfuss have apparently joked about it.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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Was the Hoid we see born naturally, or was he created?
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He was born naturally.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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Is there significance in the fact that the world of Silence Montane uses silver for protection? (Even though there is no known Allomantic use for silver)
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Yes.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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[Tell us about] coming up with the names for the Epics.
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It was really all right. I wouldn't say "proud" with regard to 'Steelheart', more "ecstatic" because I came up with the name very early on. And I'm like, "Oh, I hope no one has used this. I hope no one has used this." And then I went and looked and there were no major superheroes with that name listed on the various lists that I found. So I figure I'm pretty safe. But from going on there, finding names was really difficult. I wanted to do things that hadn't been used by any major Marvel or DC characters. And they have lots and lots and lots of characters—lots of them! And so, my instinct was if there's a Wikipedia article dedicated to this character, they're probably too big a character for me to use that name. And so, I spent most of the time either there, or there are resources on various fan sites that just list all the characters that I could search, just by names. And I would have a list of twelve names for a superhero or supervillain, and spend all this time trying to figure in, and all twelve would have been used, and I would have to go back to the drawing board and come up with twelve more, or something like that.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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Would Leras recognize Vax or is it just like some Ati backstory??
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Yeah, he would recognize Vax.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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With Dawnshard, what was going on [with revisions], there was some big things that I needed to do, and some of them I was aware of. And because the book... basically, it was written in July, and we did the beta read in August, and I'm doing the revisions in September/October; it has a really accelerated timeline. Which means that the beta read wasn't as clean as I normally like a beta read to do. I really like a beta read to have seen a book after I've done revisions that the alpha read has caught all the big problems. Or that I've had time to layer things in. Like, there is a whole aspect of this book that I knew needed to be in the book, but I just didn't have the time, the brain focus, in the first two drafts to put in. So they all had to read and complain about this thing that I knew I was going to put into the book, but they thought I'd just completely missed. In that case, I had this thing to add in; but, still, giving their feedback helped me decide how to add it in. In other cases, there were characters that just needed some expanded screentime and stuff. I can talk about it better during the spoiler stream. But also, I had multiple people who are themselves paraplegic read the book that I had written primarily from the viewpoint of a paraplegic woman. And they had just a ton of really great information on how to be more authentic to the life experience of someone like themselves, and also some of the pitfalls that authors often fall into that I hadn't known about. Really handy stuff. And we will be releasing, with the Kickstarter (because we hit the stretch goal), all the different drafts of Dawnshard, along with the beta reader document, that you'll be able to just read what everyone said and see what I took from that. You can go read, like, the 3.0 and be like, "All right, I read the 2.0; I read the beta read document. Now I can read the 3.0 and see how Brandon changed things based on what the beta readers said." And I do have a little document of the main things I'm changing and why that will go along with it. Hopefully, that sort of thing will be very helpful to you because this is the sort of thing that's really hard to explain because it's an instinct you pick up as a writer over time.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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Is the Nightwatcher Cultivation or of Cultivation somehow?
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That is strongly hinted in the book.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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Skybreaker I will seek justice Skybreaker oaths are themed toward justice, fighting for causes, and enforcing social rules. They generally reinforce the importance of moral codes, legal structures, and similar boundaries that protect civilization. The Skybreakers were the enforcers of the Knights Radiant, often tasked with keeping the peace, policing the other Orders, and making certain that dangerous or dark forces in the world were contained. This sometimes gave them a bad reputation among the more free-thinking Orders of Knights, but the Skybreakers (at their best) were not merciless. They were the ones who believed that nobody, not even a Radiant, should be above being questioned. They were the ones that did the sometimes tough job of making certain that the Orders didn’t abuse their power to become tyrants, as the Skybreakers saw that those with powers could easily oppress those who had none. They tend to attract those who believe in the importance of legal code, those who have strong moral codes of their own, and those who think the best defense against anarchy are things like patriotism, moral fiber, and rules to govern behavior. Note that the current incarnation, led by the Herald Nale in his madness, is more rigid than the ancient order, which understood that the law was not perfect, but instead represented an ideal to try to reach over time. Anyone believing in finding true justice, in defending the innocent, and in punishing the guilty would be welcome in the Order.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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Meaning Aon Ehe represents the primal force of Fire. A complex Aon with only basic symmetry, its form has often been likened to wisps of tickling fire burning out from a central coal. While the many poets in history seem to have preferred the overall symmetry of an Aon like Aon Omi or Aon Rao, not a few preferred Aon Ehe for its distinctive look and feel. (Much like Aon Shao, this Aon breaks with traditional Aon form in appearance.) For this reason, and because of the destructive yet vital power of fire, the Poet Lenehe of the fifth century named Aon Ehe “The most inspiring of all Aons, a symbol for those with a creative heart and an unhindered mind.” Recently, this Aon–easily recognizable, even to the uneducated–has become synonymous with ‘Danger,’ and is used as a warning. In many cases, in fact, it is printed on warnings which have nothing at all to do with fire. One might find it upon an unsteady bridge or a wood hiding dangerous wolves just as easily as one might find it referencing actual flames. History And Use All Aons exist independent of humankind, their symbols inherently tied to their meaning, but few have distinct origin stories explaining how the Aon was first discovered. Some modern scholars scoff at such tales, but Aon Ehe’s origin myth is well known among the common people and believed by most. The story tells of the first princess of Arelon. This was some years after the founding of Arelon following the migration of the Aonic people from other lands. Elantris, of course, had already existed as a city when that migration occurred, and had been discovered empty. While some people assumed it haunted, Proud King Rhashm (later renamed Raoshem) determined to conquer the fears of his people and set up a kingdom centered on Elantris. The transformation of the first Elantrians happened beginning several decades later. Princess Elashe–the first of Raoshem’s line to be chosen as an Elantrian–claimed to have seen the pattern of this Aon inscribed on a coal in her hearth the day after she underwent the transformation. Whether or not this story is true, a coal or rock written with Aon Ehe on it is considered good luck and a ward against winter spirits. (Though this kind of superstition is frowned upon by the Korathi priests.) Other uses of Ehe are plentiful. It is one of the primal elements, and is often used in scientific writings. It is a ward and warning against danger. It is used on signs in conjunction with other Aons to mean warm food or warm beds available. Some artists and poets choose it as their symbol, both to hint at the dangerous nature of artistry and to speak of the passion of artistry. Naming and Usage in ELANTRIS Aon Ehe is often mispronounced as “E-hay.” Though scholars of Aonic insist that the proper term, “E-Hee” is more accurate, the former is slowly being acknowledged as an acceptable pronunciation as well. It is infrequently used in names during modern days, as the meaning ‘Danger’ is seen as unfavorable. However, historically, it was a favorite Aon for poets and artists (who often took new names for themselves when entering into their maturity as an artist, a tradition by which they removed themselves from their old body of work and indicated that they were beginning anew.) Some famous examples of names from Aon Ehe include the poet Ehen, the artist Ehelan, and Mehen the philosopher. AonDor Aon Ehe is one of the most spectacular, useful, and awe inspiring of base Aons when used by an Elantrian. There are many Aons which have destructive or powerful effects, but none are as strong without modification as Aon Ehe. Drawn simply, the Aon creates a column of flame, acting as a direct and primal conduit to the Dor itself. The diameter of the column depends on the size of the Aon drawn, and the direction the column is launched depends on the direction the Aon is facing. Often, this Aon is drawn on the floor so that a column of pure fire can be launched up into the air. The column is brief–only lasting a few seconds–but incredibly powerful. With some enhancement modifiers, this Aon can be made to last longer. The pre-Reod AonDor scholars crafted lamps with flames that continued to burn no matter which way they were turned. They would even continue to burn beneath water. This Aon can be used in warfare, if necessary, though Aon Daa is generally a better weapon. As a modifier, Aon Ehe can be used to create a ward that sets off other Aon chains. It provides one of the more useful tools in an AonDor practitioner’s repertoire, though the difficulty in drawing it can make it difficult to use for the less talented.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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So do you know anything about Polish literature, especially something about fantasy? You should try the game.
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Well I know-- I can't say his name. *attempts to say "Sapkowski"* --The Witcher guy. Everybody knows The Witcher , so I do know at least a little bit of Polish-- And I have read some of his work. So I'm a little bit familiar but I wouldn't say I know a ton more. Like I bet that’s all everyone knows. “Oh yeah, Poland. The Witcher guy”. Yeah? The Witcher games? I have all three of them, I bought them all in one bundle together.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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Do powerful magnets affect metalminds or metal reserves in metalborn?
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Yes. But... that has an "*" on it.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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What is the status of the White Sand graphic novel?
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White Sand graphic novel. Let me run down the big list of things people are waiting for. So, White Sand graphic novel is on the good list, that's going really well. The author we had adapt it was fantastic and the artist is doing a great job. We're doing it in eighteen issues. However, because the people with The Wheel of Time (I don't know if any of you guys bought those graphic novels) but they released those individually, people bought subscriptions up front and then it took them forever to deliver on those. Because I have been burnt by that I said "You can't release any of the issues until you have a certain amount done". So because of that, they just decided they would release them only as graphic novels. So they're doing six-issue chunks. So it's kind of weird, there's eighteen issues, but really it's three books of six issues, and they are working on issue number six right now to release the first chunk next year. And we're very pleased with it. So, the big list. I am working on Stormlight 3 right now, so you can follow on the progress bars. Once I'm done touring, which I've been doing for way too long, you'll start to see those inch up again, and if I finish it by May or June then it can come out next year. If I don't finish it by then it would be the following Spring. So that's what I'm working on right now. In the queue we have the sequel to Shadows of Self coming out in January and we have the last of The Reckoners , and that is coming out in February. That's a little too close, I wish they hadn't scheduled them like that, but I'm not in charge when they put the books. After I write Stormlight 3 my goal is to write a new book that's kind of in the teen-ish-- it's kind of hard because Steelheart here is not published by a teen publisher, the only one published by a teen publisher here is Rithmatist . But something for the Steelheart -- like older teen/young adult-ish, crazy, wacky things like that; I've signed a contract on that. So that'll be my next project. Then I'm going to do Rithmatist 2, then I'm going to do Wax and Wayne 4, which is the last of that sequence. Then I'm going to do Stormlight 4. If the book you're waiting for is not in that list then it's going to come after Stormlight 4 so don't hold your breath. Mistborn videogame is basically vaporware at this point I'm afraid. I love the guys that are making it. They're still working on it, they still plan to release it. I haven't seen even a demo or early footage or anything like that, so I'm not certain they'll be able to do anything and you guys should not hold your breath on that. So, movies, I've sold Mistborn , The Emperor's Soul and Steelheart , all are in production, but that doesn't mean anything in Hollywood, in production can mean anything. None of them have started filming yet. Until something starts filming you should assume that it's a hopeful dream. Those are the hopeful dreams that people are paying me a lot of money for. So, there you are.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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When Khriss visits Scadrial, does Harmony know it?
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*written* Some times He does. (more often than not, these days...) But it is possible to hide. *spoken* Khriss doesn't have a lot of reasons to hide. She doesn't mind the attention, usually.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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why does Marsh have a Feruchemical atium spike?
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You'll have to figure that out! RAFO.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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I started writing my first novel when I was fifteen years old. I didn’t have a computer; I had an old, electric typewriter. It would remember your file on a disc, but it was really just a printer with an attached bare-bones word processor. (It had a tiny LCD screen at the top that could display three lines at a time. You could scroll through and edit bit by bit, then you hit print and it would type out the document.) The book was terrible. It was essentially a hybrid of Tad Williams and Dragonlance, though at the time I felt it was totally new and original. It did have a wizard who threw fireballs with smiley faces on the front, though, so that’s kind of cool. At its core were two stories. One vital one was the tale of a wise king who was murdered by assassins, forcing his younger brother to take up the mantle and lead the kingdom while trying to find/protect the king’s son and rightful heir. The other was about a young man named Rick, originally blamed for the murder. I still have some of these pages. (Not the entire book, unfortunately.) I used to hide them behind a picture on the wall of my room so that nobody would find them. I was so anxious about letting people read my writing, and was—for some reason—paranoid my family would find the pages and read them, then make fun of them. Over the years, many ideas proliferated and matured in my mind. I began writing books in earnest (I never finished that one I started as a teenager.) I grew as a writer, and discovered how to make my works less derivative. Most of my ideas from my teenage self died out, and rightly so. Others evolved. My maturing sensibilities as both a reader and a writer changed how I saw the world, and some stories stood the test of both time and internal criticism, becoming stronger for the conflict. Rick became Jerick, hero of the book now known as Dragonsteel . (It was my honor’s thesis in college, and will someday be rewritten and published. For now, the only copy available is through interlibrary loan, though it appears to have vanished.) Jared, the man who lost his brother and had to lead in his stead, protecting his nephew, slowly evolved into a man named Dalinar, one of the primary protagonists of The Way of Kings . Some of you may be curious to know that the character many now call Hoid also appeared in that ancient book of mine. These two epics— Dragonsteel and The Way of Kings —have shaped a lot of my passions and writing goals over the last two decades. For example, in my last year of college I took an introductory illustration class to try my hand at drawing. My final project was a portfolio piece of sketches of plants and animals from Roshar, as even then I was hoping to someday be able to publish The Way of Kings with copious in-world illustrations of Roshar and its life. (At that time, I was planning to have an illustrated appendix, though I eventually decided to spread the pages through the book.) Fortunately, I was able to hire artists to do the work in this book instead of forcing you to look at what I came up with . . . Well, finally—after two decades of writing—Tor has given me the chance to share The Way of Kings with you. They’ve taken a risk on this book. At every juncture, they agreed to do as I asked, often choosing the more expensive option as it was a better artistic decision. Michael Whelan on the cover. 400K words in length. Almost thirty full page interior illustrations. High-end printing processes in order to make the interior art look crisp and beautiful. A piece of in-world writing on the back cover, rather than a long list of marketing blurbs. Interludes inside the book that added to the length, and printing costs, but which fleshed out the world and the story in ways I’d always dreamed of doing. This is a massive book. That seems fitting, as it has been two decades in the making for me. Writing this essay, I find myself feeling oddly relieved. Yes, part of me is nervous—more nervous for this book than I have been for any book save The Gathering Storm . But a greater part of me is satisfied. I finally got it published. Whatever else happens, whatever else comes, I managed to tell this story. The Way of Kings isn’t hidden behind the painting in my room any longer.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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I asked if we had met any other Rithmatists who gained any their abilities from some other method than the Inception ceremony besides Nalazar.
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That was a flat out no. "Unless you include what Harding was doing."
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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Somebody asked me if there's any Lovecraftian influences in my books, because I do enjoy Lovecraft. And so I thought, "Well this would be a good interlude to read," for that reason.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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Lies of the Beholder finds Stephen Leeds in a more precarious place—psychologically and otherwise—than we've ever seen him. What are the challenges of writing a character like this with so many aspects? Was this a difficult story to write?
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This was a very difficult story to write, but not because of all the aspects. They've always made the story easier, not harder. Being able to take an individual's personality and split it into various themes and ideas...well, that was fun, and helped me understand him a great deal. The challenge of this story was finding myself wanting to explore the more philosophical and conceptual side of what it means to be Stephen Leeds—and why I related to him specifically as a character. I had to decide if I wanted this ending to be like the other two novellas—pretty straightforward detective mysteries—or if I'd let myself go off into something more conceptual. In the end, I went more conceptual, which I felt was appropriate to ending this series. However, it does mean this story was a challenge in that I was dealing with some heady themes while trying to do justice to the actual mystery. I'm not 100% sure if those two ever ended up balancing right, but I do think this was the correct way to go with the ending.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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In the original version of Kings , the character in Shallan's place was engaged to a different character!
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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Are Hoid and the Set aware of each other? How do they feel about each other? On both sides?
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Yes, but I wouldn't say the Set as a general rule, but members of the Set. Some various shades of loathing. Yes.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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Have you decided whether it'll be Dalinar, Szeth, or Eshonai as the focus of Stormlight 3?
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Nope, I’m writing Calamity right now, and when I’m done, and I’m, the first thing I will do is go to Stormlight 3, and I’ll start writing on the flashback sequences for all three and decide which one matches the best.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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Could an awakened sentient object (e.g Nightblood) bond a spren?
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Technically but the specific circumstances you would need are so bizarre, in practice no.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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[Tell us about] coming up with the names for the Epics.
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It was really all right. I wouldn't say "proud" with regard to 'Steelheart', more "ecstatic" because I came up with the name very early on. And I'm like, "Oh, I hope no one has used this. I hope no one has used this." And then I went and looked and there were no major superheroes with that name listed on the various lists that I found. So I figure I'm pretty safe. But from going on there, finding names was really difficult. I wanted to do things that hadn't been used by any major Marvel or DC characters. And they have lots and lots and lots of characters—lots of them! And so, my instinct was if there's a Wikipedia article dedicated to this character, they're probably too big a character for me to use that name. And so, I spent most of the time either there, or there are resources on various fan sites that just list all the characters that I could search, just by names. And I would have a list of twelve names for a superhero or supervillain, and spend all this time trying to figure in, and all twelve would have been used, and I would have to go back to the drawing board and come up with twelve more, or something like that.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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Is the Nightwatcher Cultivation or of Cultivation somehow?
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That is strongly hinted in the book.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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Will there be any sequels to Elantris ?
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In 2015, the 10th anniversary of the series, he intends to release Dragonriders , three books based on side characters. They will take place 10 years after events, in the city of Dakhor.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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Let's say we had a platypus Feruchemist, who can sense electric fields. Could he make a tinmind for that sense?
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Platypus tinmind should work.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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It's National Novel Writing Month. Do you have any advice for amateur writers jumping into this endeavor?
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Yeah, NaNoWriMo. I did this for many years before I got published. I was already writing, my friends were all doing it, so I'm like, "Yeah, I'll keep going and, then I won't tell you guys my word count because then you'll feel bad." *laughter* We always had, like, a race board posted on a website, that just posted what the daily count was supposed to be. I often doubled it. So, I was like this even back then. I would say, for you, to-- Number one, don't let the word count goal intimidate you. If you don't get 50,000-- the whole goal is just to get you out of your writing comfort zone. So, for you, 25,000 is where you're going, and you actually still do that, that's fine. 50,000 isn't a novel anyway, they just say it is. I mean it is technically a novel, but I mean, how many novels are 50,000 words? There's not very many. A lot of middle grade is around 50,000 words. I would just go for it. The other thing is, have a daily habit of when you're going to write, and try to make that sacrosanct and get into this habit of, I'm writing for these two hours. And kind of unplug during those two hours and write during those two hours. Worry less about what your word count is you're hitting. Do try to not self-edit. That's the biggest thing that's gonna to help you. If you're not going back and revising and revising and revising, and you're pushing forward-- the goal is to teach yourself to finish something and to push forward and turn off your internal editor.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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When you take a memory out of a coppermind it starts <degrade away>. Would that happen with someone who has an eidetic memory? But if it is real, then it would...?
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Yes. Well... no. With the exception of, a photographic memory is disputed by science. In the cosmere they exist, magically enhanced. But there is science in our world that says these aren't real things. So, I'm not sure. You'd have to go to the science and see if they're actually real. Then it would not degrade. It's the brain's own failings that are causing this.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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Right now I'm writing Skyward 3, which I'm calling "Nowhere." Which I know the publisher is not terribly fond of, and I'm only so-so on it, so it might change before we go to press; we'll have to see.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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Do you find it harder to write from a male or female's point of view?
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It is harder to write-- The more different someone is from me, the more difficult they are to write. Gender is only one part of that, however, and so some characters who are very like me, but maybe-- maybe a woman, would be easier to write than someone who is very different from me but is a guy. But that's all kind of part of it. Early in my career, before I got published, I was actually really bad at this; but the main thing I learned from that era of my writing was that I was writing people to a role in the story. It wasn't that I was bad at writing women, it was that I was writing all women as the love interest. Which resulted in bad storytelling and flat characters. And if you start to be able to learn: treat each character they are the protagonist of their own story, treat each character like they see themselves, not as a bit part, but as the story themselves; and start to explore who they are rather than putting them in a role in the story, your characters will get better all around.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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I asked for something about Honorblades that we don't already know.
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One Herald (other than Taln) kept his Honorblade (or, at least, took it back)
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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Newcago was a HUGE surprise for me. I expected to see Chicago, but roughed up in a dystopian way. Instead you took a major city we all know, and made it completely new and interactive. The catacombs, in particular were really interesting to me. Did you base Newcago's catacombs off of a "real" place?
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Newcago's catacombs were actually based more off of mid-eighties cyberpunk stories where you've often got this sort of techie underground, and I love that visual. I intentionally didn't want to take Steelheart in a dystopian direction, even though it technically is a dystopia. I just feel that the whole "wasted world" dystopia has been done so well by so many writers that I wanted to have something that felt new and different. When I gave Steelheart this sort of Midas power to turn Chicago into metal, I thought it would be cool to have these catacombs dug underneath it because the visual was so different and cool. The catacombs I've visited in various cities are, of course, awesome, but really I'm looking back at those cyberpunk books.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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So originally book 3 was Szeth and book 5 was Dalinar? Good that it changed...I cannot imagine book 3 without Dalinar's flaskbacks. The story wouldn't be so powerful. Now I am curious, did Dalinar get his memories back in the original planning for book 3?
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As others have theorized, this wouldn't have worked quite the same way. Oathbringer's ending would still have been its ending--but we wouldn't have had the flashbacks and some of the revelations about Dalinar's character. It quickly became obvious to me, however, that the confrontation with the thrill, the reveal regarding the ancient Radiants, and the solidification of the new Radiants as a unified(?) group needed to all happen alongside Dalinar's flashbacks (and his recovered memories) instead alongside Szeth's flashbacks and his plot, a big chunk of which was moved to book five.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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Is it possible to use a Steelpush while wearing Shardplate? After some confusion re: not Pushing on the Plate, but something else.
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Yes. And we… think the mass of the plate would be what determined the force needed, not its (much lighter) effective weight to the bearer.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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What is the status of the White Sand graphic novel?
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White Sand graphic novel. Let me run down the big list of things people are waiting for. So, White Sand graphic novel is on the good list, that's going really well. The author we had adapt it was fantastic and the artist is doing a great job. We're doing it in eighteen issues. However, because the people with The Wheel of Time (I don't know if any of you guys bought those graphic novels) but they released those individually, people bought subscriptions up front and then it took them forever to deliver on those. Because I have been burnt by that I said "You can't release any of the issues until you have a certain amount done". So because of that, they just decided they would release them only as graphic novels. So they're doing six-issue chunks. So it's kind of weird, there's eighteen issues, but really it's three books of six issues, and they are working on issue number six right now to release the first chunk next year. And we're very pleased with it. So, the big list. I am working on Stormlight 3 right now, so you can follow on the progress bars. Once I'm done touring, which I've been doing for way too long, you'll start to see those inch up again, and if I finish it by May or June then it can come out next year. If I don't finish it by then it would be the following Spring. So that's what I'm working on right now. In the queue we have the sequel to Shadows of Self coming out in January and we have the last of The Reckoners , and that is coming out in February. That's a little too close, I wish they hadn't scheduled them like that, but I'm not in charge when they put the books. After I write Stormlight 3 my goal is to write a new book that's kind of in the teen-ish-- it's kind of hard because Steelheart here is not published by a teen publisher, the only one published by a teen publisher here is Rithmatist . But something for the Steelheart -- like older teen/young adult-ish, crazy, wacky things like that; I've signed a contract on that. So that'll be my next project. Then I'm going to do Rithmatist 2, then I'm going to do Wax and Wayne 4, which is the last of that sequence. Then I'm going to do Stormlight 4. If the book you're waiting for is not in that list then it's going to come after Stormlight 4 so don't hold your breath. Mistborn videogame is basically vaporware at this point I'm afraid. I love the guys that are making it. They're still working on it, they still plan to release it. I haven't seen even a demo or early footage or anything like that, so I'm not certain they'll be able to do anything and you guys should not hold your breath on that. So, movies, I've sold Mistborn , The Emperor's Soul and Steelheart , all are in production, but that doesn't mean anything in Hollywood, in production can mean anything. None of them have started filming yet. Until something starts filming you should assume that it's a hopeful dream. Those are the hopeful dreams that people are paying me a lot of money for. So, there you are.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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[Context: From TWG Posts (2002-01-01)]
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So, I'm entering a portion of my current book [Mistborn] where I have to devise a lot of names. Anyone want a Cameo? I could throw in something close to your name, or perhaps a version of one of your usernames, if you wish. Firstcomers get speaking parts. Well, Lord Rian Strobe just got added to the book. He's even got a line! (He asks a young lady to dance.) OutKast: Elariel is a good fantasy name--won't have any problems with that. Tekiel: Can probably use that one straight-up, if you want. Okay, 'House Erikeller' just got mentioned as one of the major noble houses in the book. They probably won't have a big part, but they are weapons merchants, which I thought you might appreciate. Gemm, I didn't so much as give you a character as base an entire cultural dialect off of your language patterns. They're a bunch of underground street punks who like to speak in a slang that (intentionally) confuses everyone else. There is a character in the book from that culture, though he's a few years younger than you. Well, House Elariel and the Lady Stace Whiten just got cameos. House Elariel throws a party that some characters attend; Lady Whiten is a young woman that is supposedly one of characters' dates, but he ditches her. (Sorry. He's kind of like that.) Okay, busy night. First off, House Tekiel showed up in the book. In connection with that, I managed to work in House Geffenry and House Izenry. My favorite for the night, however, is the appearance of Lord Charleir Entrone. He shows up only as a corpse, having been stabbed in the back while in a drunken stupor, but he has a reputation of being a twisted connoisseur of underground bloodfight gambling.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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In The Final Empire , Kelsier says that it will take 300 years before atium grows back in the Pits of Hathsin. How does he know this?
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I think it is mentioned somewhere else how long it takes a crystal to regrow, and he's just basing it off of, in the past, when a crystal is damaged, how long it takes one to come back... I'm pretty sure that that is even mentioned somewhere, but if not, that's just how he knows.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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If I took a fabrial to Shadesmar, would it work and what would happen to the spren trapped in it?
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RAFO.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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You kinda talked about where you got the idea for <highstorms>, but in the Firefight -- The Reckoners series, was there a particular character you gave them their powers because you thought that power was [cool]?
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So the question is: In The Reckoners , was there a particular power that I gave to someone because I just thought that power was cool. And yeah, the tensors. They can turn things to dust. For years I'd been walking around looking at our society where we have all this metal and this wood around, and things like that. I just loved the idea of just being able to turn it to dust. Maybe it's like a "reducing things to their more primal state" or whatever-- but anyway it was one of those magics that was in my head for a while. And really superheroes are magic. I don't pretend that they're science fiction, they're magic. So I just designed these magics that feel cool to me.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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I really enjoyed the newspaper clippings that you've done in recent books, and I was just wondering what kind of preparation you've done for them, because they are really engaging.
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He's enjoyed the newspaper clippings - which there is a bunch of them here, if you didn't pick one of these up, as promotion for this books... Because we have to chop it up, the broadsheet, in the book itself, we printed full ones that you can take, just because they look so nifty. I love the little one about the Soonie pups. What preparation did I do? My whole team, me, and Isaac [Stewart], and Ben McSweeney would put these together. Ben is one of the artists I use a lot, and Isaac is one of my employees. We read a whole bunch of Period newspapers and saw what they were doing. And we were like "wow, they advertised whiskey and cigars a whole bunch, stuff like that" *audience laughter* And we just kind of tried to get the tone down for those. And for these things I wrote some of them, but I didn't write all of them. Actually Ben wrote some and Isaac wrote some. With the idea being that we wanted to have a different kind of voice for the newspapers, so it felt like a bunch of different journalists were writing articles. And so we would brainstorm a bunch of ideas together, and we would all go out and write little clips about them, and we put the best ones in. And of course we hit little hints about the plot lines of this book and future books.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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I'm not doing the [BYU] lectures as YouTube videos this time. We figure we only wanna do these every three or four years; there's no reason to do them every year. But, because of covid, I have to stream the class to all of my students. And I do apologize; it is a closed stream through the university. But we will be creating highlights out of each lecture; maybe there'll be a fifteen-minute or a thirty-minute chunk here that Adam thinks will make a good stand-on-its-own thing, and you will get to see those probably after the semester's done, whenever Adam gets them together. We're gonna be doing that from the Lair.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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So we know a Shardholder who used up his mind to imprison another Shard. Can a Splinter use up its mind? Okay. But it could...
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Okay, yes. Something that small probably will not be able to accomplish the same thing. There is possibility that it could for something smaller.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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You brought up the magic system [of Way of Kings], and it's fairly unique. It's hard to wrap your head around it at first, but once you get into the story it actually makes a lot of sense. So, how long did it take you to develop that actual aspect of the novel?
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It depends on the book. For this one, it's been going for a long time. This is one of the magic systems I've just been playing with forever, the idea... Now, I describe the basics of the magic systems, and I'm worried that that will scare people off, because you don't need to know any of this stuff. The magic is fun, it should be just part of the story. But if you really wanna dig deeply, this one is based off the idea of fundamental forces. The [four] fundamental forces. Gravitation and electromagnetics and strong and weak nuclear forces. Those are the concepts that built this magic system, where I built an idea of a world with essentially ten fundamental forces, and built ten orders of Knights, each who learn to manipulate a type of these forces. So that is a growth over about ten years of work, to build this magic system with these ideas of "How can I make these fundamental forces manipulate them, what can it do? How can I make surface tension into a magic system? Or how can I make pressure into a magic system? Or gravitation that works in a magic system?" But in other ones, it's just a quirky idea that occurs to me. Warbreaker, I spent only about four months building the magic system for that; an idea, you know, sympathetic magic of bringing things to life and using Breath as a metaphor for someone's life just kind of fell into place and worked together, and I did it. It depends on the book.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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I also just finished Shadows of Self and was thinking about what would happen if a kandra tried to eat a shade. If they don't have bones, it probably can't happen I guess. But maybe a shade that was a kandra could be pretty frightening.
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Yes, a kandra couldn't eat a Shade. And how scary the shade kandra would be depends entirely on the kandra, I'd figure...
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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So we know that you can't just have someone-- If someone were to do something similar to Hoid, he can't just pop and go "Oh look, I can now do Allomancy or I can now do Surgebinding". What about Breath? If someone could somebody get Breath-- Maybe not *audio obscured* Could they still get the benefits of-- So you could Awaken? *audio obscured* *audio obscured* *audio obscured*
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Oh, good question... Yes you can, actually. Breath is-- Once it is given to you, it is being keyed to you. Your Identity. So that transfer makes it yours to use however you want. You could Awaken. If you-- If you were to somehow make it there, you would be able to Awaken. It's the easiest of magic systems to get the magic from, and then to manipulate. Because it has keyed into it Identity. Yes, you can take Breath onto another world. In fact, you've seen characters do this. It would work, yes. Yes, it would work the same way. The only magic that is location-dependent-- The ones who aren't interested in this, just hum to yourself, okay? *laughter* You don't need to know any of this stuff to enjoy the books, okay? I write them so that you could just-- each series can be read independently, and enjoyed. There is behind the scenes stuff, and if you want to dig, it goes pretty deep. So on Sel, we have AonDor. AonDor is based on the fact that the Dor, which is an amalgamation of Dominion and Devotion, has been pressed together and stuffed into the Cognitive Realm by Odium who didn't want it to gain sentience, as Investiture will do if it is left alone. It will either seek someone to be its Vessel or it will gain sentience. He pressed it in there; he pressed it together, which creates the violent reaction, because those two intents are opposed. And that is the foundation of the magic. Because it's stuck in the Cognitive Realm rather than the Spiritual Realm (the Spiritual Realm is location-independent; Cognitive Realm is location-dependent), it makes the magic on Sel only work in close proximity to what is keyed through there to the location they're keyed to. This has to do with Identity and Connection. Mostly Connection. So that means you can't do AonDor on another planet, but you can do other magics works anywhere, because they're drawing the magics specifically through either the place, or they're end-neutral, like Breath is, and you don't need any extra power.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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So the reason that I write so many different things is because I found every writer, when they are working on a book for a long time, perhaps you know this too, starts to hate that book. They get so tired of it because you do so many drafts, and spend so long. When I finish a book I dont want to work on a sequel to that book. I am done with that book. I need something very new and different to refresh myself. So like how you eat grapes in between bites of cheese. This is why I do so many different things.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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You know Hoid's Letter, that's in The Way of Kings ? It's given to a dragon, right? Is he immortal? And he's a he, not a she?
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He calls him an old reptile. Functionally, meaning he doesn't age, but he could be killed. It is a he.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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So assuming that the other novels in the White Sand trilogy were meant to be the same length, that means White Sand will take about nine years to finish? Hah! As one of the people who've had the fortune to read a copy of the White Sand manuscript you sent, I have to say I find the likelihood of it not being a hit close to zero. So we're getting at least 3 graphic novels, with a possibility of more depending on reception right?
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Well, there's a big "IF" in there. We don't know how the book will be received in the first place. If it IS well received, and people want more, I will sit down with the person who adapted my book and see if we can take my notes and do them justice in an adaptation for another graphic novel. We'll see how things go. I'm hoping they come out faster than one a year, but I can't promise anything, as I really don't have much experience with this. My only mandate to the publisher was that we do them as graphic novel collections, instead of individual comics, as I didn't want to risk a repeat of the Wheel of Time comic situation (where one issue came out, and then a LONG delay came before the second appeared.) Yes, that's correct. Yes. The book is long enough, that the script turned out to be quite long. I don't know if they're planning an omnibus eventually or not.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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Is the Fleet story indicative of future events/ending of SA?
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Yes. Hoid is telling Kaladin things he needs to know. But Hoid's knowledge of the future doesn't extend that far... [or something like that].
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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We've had great topics and discussions about this. If all of your characters were in a death match, who would win?
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Honest truth is Kelsier. This is because of most of the characters, Kelsier is the one that is ruthless enough to get what he wants. Others would not be as ruthless. Kelsier as a character is very interesting to me. My kind of pitch on him to myself was he would be the villain in most stories. Kelsier in a lot of stories being told, in a lot of books that I would write, he's the villain but in this world, at this time, it is what the world needs and he is the hero. That's why I say Kelsier.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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I've always wondered, how do you determine where the line between "Word of Brandon" and "Read and Find Out" is? Has it ever caused issues where you've said something, but later that thing changed when it went into a book making your first statement now false? Thanks so much for writing as much as you do, I'm looking forward to all your upcoming books, keep up the great work!
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Boy, this one is an art, not a science. I've several times said something that I later decided to change in a book. I've always got this idea in the back of my head that the books are canon, and things I say at signing aren't 100% canon. This is part because of a habit I have of falling back on things I decided years ago, then revised in notes after I realized they didn't work. My off-the-cuff instinct is still to go with what I had in my head for years, even when it's no longer canon. An example of this are Shardblades. In the first draft of TWoK in 2002, I had the mechanics of the weapons work in a specific way. (If you wanted to steal one from someone, you knock off the bonding gemstone, and it breaks the bond.) I later decided it was more dramatic if you couldn't steal a Shardblade that way--you had to kill the person or force them to relinquish the bond. It worked far better. But in Oathbringer , Peter had to remind me of that change, as I just kind of nonchalantly wrote into a scene a comment about knocking off a gemstone to steal a Shardblade. These things leak back in, as you might expect for a series I've been working on for some twenty years now--with lore being revised all along. So...short answer...yes, I've contradicted myself a number of times. I try very, very hard to let the books be the canon however. So you can default to them. As for what I answer and what I RAFO...it depends on how much I want to reveal at the moment, if I'm trying to preserve specific surprises, or if I just want people to focus on other things at the moment. Like I said, art and not science.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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I've got a question about Hoid. Now that he is a [worldhopper], he's been in quite a few books, do you have any plans or is it possible that he may windup jumping realities into a universe that, as you write more books that are outside the cosmere, or do you just kind of plan of having him--
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Good question. So the question is am I going to have Hoid, who has appeared in many of my books, jump between universes as I write more outside the cosmere. The answer is actually no. I have a distinct story that I'm telling in the cosmere and it's less about the fun of connecting all my works, which is fun, but it's less about that and more about the actual story. Part of the reason I'm actually doing this thing with Hoid is I like the idea-- playing with the idea, of what is an epic. An epic that spans many many years is really cool to me, so I have hidden that amongst my books, and it'll eventually come out in a much more direct way. I actually had to make this choice pretty early in my career, when I was writing The Rithmatist was the first one. You know, the Alcatraz books are just goofy and zany, so I didn't have to think about it as much with those, but with The Rithmatist I was like "what am I going to do with this?". Because it had originally been planned as a cosmere book, and then I decided I wanted to set it on Earth and I didn't want to do a lot of these sort of political things on Earth in the cosmere, I wanted it to be a far-off and distant place. And that's when I made the break, I said "no I'm not going to put him in this". And that made it easy when people were like "hey, you going to sneak him into The Wheel of Time ?". Nah nah let's move along there. A lot of people were expecting me to sneak him in.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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Can one person speak the oaths of more than one order of the Knights Radiant?
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That is a RAFO. It is theoretically possible, but we'll RAFO anything else about that.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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How is Kaladin able to consistently recognize Syl, even when she's in different forms?
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This has to do with their bond.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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Hey, I wouldn't normally contact you directly like this, but given that you thought it important enough to reach out and let me know you might change how savants work, I figured you probably wouldn't be too upset by this message. I replied to your Facebook comment, asking if you could clarify a little bit which aspects of savantism you are thinking of keeping and/or cutting. I don't need an essay on the topic (though you know I'd love one!), just some details on what we can consider canon for theories, and what we should be careful around. Okay, so - if you do decide to go this route, I see the story implications (larger focus on consequences, less easy to get to the point where a character can be considered a savant). What I am not sure about is the potential for a mechanical change. Would a backpedal on your side cause a conflict with information you've shared with us, in or out of your books? Are you saying that it's possible that Wax won't be considered a savant (if you can't squeeze a good ramifications plot for him that doesn't contradict the apparent lack of consequences so far, for example)?
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Warning, Evgeni. I'm really considering doing a backpedal on savants. The more i think about them, the less I'm not liking how my current course has them being treated in upcoming books. I think it deviates too far from my original vision. Evgeni, So here's the problem. The more I dig into savants in the later outlines, the more I feel that I'm in a dangerous area--in that I'm disobeying their original intention. (Which is that using the power so much that it permeates your soul can be dangerous, a kind of uncontrolled version of a spren bond.) And so, I don't want to let myself just start making people savants right and left. It needs to be a specific thing. Wax is the troubling one, as I have him burning so much steel that he's well on his way, but isn't showing any side effects. If I'm going to give him savant-like abilities, he needs savant-like consequences. That's the danger, just falling back on savanthood to do some of the things I want, so often that it undermines the actual point and purpose of them in the cosmere lore. So if I backpedal, it will be to contain this and point myself the right way, sharply curtailing my desire to make people savants without their savanthood being an intrinsic part of their story and conflict in life. (Like it was for Spook, and is for Soulcasting savants on Roshar.) Feel free to share this. I haven't decided on anything yet. It's mostly consequences for the future--just a kind of, "be aware I'm not 100% pleased with how Wax turned out, re: savanthood and Allomantic resonance." The idea of resonance is that two powers, combined, meld kind of into one single power. This is a manifestation of the way Shards combine. Wax was intended as a savant of the two melded powers. But without consequences in his plot, I'm not confident that I'll continue in the same vein for future books.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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How do they handle, like, trash and bathrooms in the Purelake? How does that work?
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Fortunately, you have a couple of things going on here. You fortunately have low population. You have highstorms and driving and-- so, the waste is broken down really easily. The trash is a problem. But it's a pre-industrial society, so the trash is not stuff that doesn't ever biodegrade, and things like this, and you do have traders going through, and things like this. So, it all kind of works out. It's the low population that's really helping with a lot of this. It's not as bad, a big a deal as you would think it is... All of Roshar has a slight issue in that you just can't bury things, but you do have the crem that comes down and hardens around things and creates a layer of stone, and things like this. In my opinion, the way I've worked it out, it all just kind of works out just fine... It's no bigger a deal in the Purelake, in other words, than these other places. In fact it's kind of a smaller deal. Like, you might ask, like, traveling out on the greatshells in the Reshi Sea, they would have a harder problem in some ways, 'cause they have a tight population density on top of something that they also can't bury anything, and stuff like that. I just had to work out the ecology of the system to work.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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If two people are identical twins, and one is a Mistborn, will the second be Mistborn?
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No. They could have different Spiritual DNA.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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If Rysn's Dawnshard is about Change or Remaking or something like, how do we refer to it? The Dawnshard of Change? The Change Dawnshard? I am asking purely from a semantic standpoint.
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I haven't honestly decided yet, Argent. I am playing with several themes for the Dawnshards even still. RAFO, I'm afraid. As I said somewhere else, this was written as it was deliberately--but also somewhat vague on purpose.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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There is a debate on what to call Shallan's Symbols, so we don't have such an ambiguous term for it . Yeah, the Symbolhead, Shallanspren. We don't really know what to call them. You don't have to canonize it yet.
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The Symbolhead? *laughter* Do I want to canonize this yet? I don't know if I want to canonize it yet. But I will say this. They are spren, that should be pretty obvious. They are the spren connected to what Shallan is capable of doing. But I don’t know if I want to canonize it yet. Truthspren is as good a name as any, and I would suggest you use that until further notice.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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When Khriss visits Scadrial, does Harmony know it?
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*written* Some times He does. (more often than not, these days...) But it is possible to hide. *spoken* Khriss doesn't have a lot of reasons to hide. She doesn't mind the attention, usually.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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With Dawnshard, what was going on [with revisions], there was some big things that I needed to do, and some of them I was aware of. And because the book... basically, it was written in July, and we did the beta read in August, and I'm doing the revisions in September/October; it has a really accelerated timeline. Which means that the beta read wasn't as clean as I normally like a beta read to do. I really like a beta read to have seen a book after I've done revisions that the alpha read has caught all the big problems. Or that I've had time to layer things in. Like, there is a whole aspect of this book that I knew needed to be in the book, but I just didn't have the time, the brain focus, in the first two drafts to put in. So they all had to read and complain about this thing that I knew I was going to put into the book, but they thought I'd just completely missed. In that case, I had this thing to add in; but, still, giving their feedback helped me decide how to add it in. In other cases, there were characters that just needed some expanded screentime and stuff. I can talk about it better during the spoiler stream. But also, I had multiple people who are themselves paraplegic read the book that I had written primarily from the viewpoint of a paraplegic woman. And they had just a ton of really great information on how to be more authentic to the life experience of someone like themselves, and also some of the pitfalls that authors often fall into that I hadn't known about. Really handy stuff. And we will be releasing, with the Kickstarter (because we hit the stretch goal), all the different drafts of Dawnshard, along with the beta reader document, that you'll be able to just read what everyone said and see what I took from that. You can go read, like, the 3.0 and be like, "All right, I read the 2.0; I read the beta read document. Now I can read the 3.0 and see how Brandon changed things based on what the beta readers said." And I do have a little document of the main things I'm changing and why that will go along with it. Hopefully, that sort of thing will be very helpful to you because this is the sort of thing that's really hard to explain because it's an instinct you pick up as a writer over time.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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From which stage of development does human embryo on Scadrial gain Hemalurgic potential?
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Conception.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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Compared to Oathbringer , how much Szeth are we going to see in the book? I was kind of imagining, he's like the first character expected to die in the first five books.
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This one, probably less Szeth than Oathbringer . Mostly, because we're going to get his big plot in the next book. There's some cool Szeth stuff in this still, but we're looking more like first book Szeth rather than third book Szeth, where I give him his own micro plot in book 3. He starts in jail, in book four. Because Dalinar told him to go there.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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Is the Nightwatcher Cultivation or of Cultivation somehow?
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That is strongly hinted in the book.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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He talked about the link between his magic systems. One of the core principles is 'investing'. In a lot of his systems people are through some mechanism invested with magic powers. In Elantris through the Shaod, In Mistborn it's genetic, in The Way of Kings it depends on what someone has done.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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In the third Mistborn novel, Marsh's view was shown briefly but what I want to see is a story were one is a main character. This could show many cool stories like, Marsh's training to become an inquisitor (bit like scary hogwarts) or others.
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I'm sure I'll do some more Marsh viewpoints eventually, but I have my hands full getting things ready for the collection. (Plus, it has multiple stories from Scadrial already. It's Roshar we're missing.)
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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I've always wondered, how do you determine where the line between "Word of Brandon" and "Read and Find Out" is? Has it ever caused issues where you've said something, but later that thing changed when it went into a book making your first statement now false? Thanks so much for writing as much as you do, I'm looking forward to all your upcoming books, keep up the great work!
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Boy, this one is an art, not a science. I've several times said something that I later decided to change in a book. I've always got this idea in the back of my head that the books are canon, and things I say at signing aren't 100% canon. This is part because of a habit I have of falling back on things I decided years ago, then revised in notes after I realized they didn't work. My off-the-cuff instinct is still to go with what I had in my head for years, even when it's no longer canon. An example of this are Shardblades. In the first draft of TWoK in 2002, I had the mechanics of the weapons work in a specific way. (If you wanted to steal one from someone, you knock off the bonding gemstone, and it breaks the bond.) I later decided it was more dramatic if you couldn't steal a Shardblade that way--you had to kill the person or force them to relinquish the bond. It worked far better. But in Oathbringer , Peter had to remind me of that change, as I just kind of nonchalantly wrote into a scene a comment about knocking off a gemstone to steal a Shardblade. These things leak back in, as you might expect for a series I've been working on for some twenty years now--with lore being revised all along. So...short answer...yes, I've contradicted myself a number of times. I try very, very hard to let the books be the canon however. So you can default to them. As for what I answer and what I RAFO...it depends on how much I want to reveal at the moment, if I'm trying to preserve specific surprises, or if I just want people to focus on other things at the moment. Like I said, art and not science.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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Do highstorms get weaker as they move west because of normal meteorological reasons the same way a hurricane gets weaker over land or is it because they slowly drain investiture as they infuse spheres over the whole continent?
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Both. He said that anything like that will be affected by both normal science as well as the magic, but then he added that the highstorms are a natural occurring phenomenon that were on the planet before stuff started going down.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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As a beginner, I would like to ask your advice on how to narrow that gap between my storytelling and story writing. (I have watched your online lectures on fantasy and sci-fi writing).
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You phrase this in a great way, as the writing and the storytelling are two distinct skills that often intertwine. Reading into your question, I think that what you’re asking is how to make the things in your head (the storytelling) work on the page (the story writing). I have to warn you, however, that a lot of times there’s a little more going on than I might have mentioned in my lectures. The metaphor I often use in the lecture is how, as an early trumpet player, I could hear some music I wanted to play in my head (specifically when doing improvised jazz) but didn’t yet have the skill to make those sounds come out the front of the horn. This is a good metaphor, but it leaves something unsaid. A lot of writers can imagine a perfect story, but then have trouble writing it down. My experience tells me, however, that much of the time, that story isn’t actually perfect in our heads. We pretend it is because we can’t see the problems with it when we’re imagining it—we gloss over the difficulties, the issues that are quite real but invisible until we actually try to put the thing together on the page. So you have two potential problems. One is that the story in your head isn’t, and never was, as flawless as you imagined. The second is that your skill in writing isn’t up to telling the things that ARE working in your head. Both are eventually resolved through practice. To finally get around to some practical advice like you wanted, however, there are a couple of ways to bridge this gap. One is to practice outlining. Now, I’ve often been clear that there is no one right way to write a story, and non-outlining methods are valid. However, if you really want to start looking at the structure of your story critically, forcing yourself to outline it first can really help. Plus, one big advantage of a solid outline is that you’re able to keep less in your head while working for the day. You can look at the outline, know what story beats need to be accomplished, and focus your mental energy on things like showing instead of telling and really nailing character voice/motivations instead of worrying if this plot point will end up working or not. These fundamentals are another really great way to bridge that gap. Few new writers fail because they lack vision, originality, or ambition. They fail because it is difficult to write a character that is compelling. Or they fail because it’s tough to evoke a sense of wonder in exploring a new world while at the same time not bog the story down with unnecessary details. Practicing things like voice, showing instead of telling, and evoking setting through character can let you make the page-by-page writing interesting and compelling, which then serves to make your story work long enough for you to get to the grand ideas.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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Do Splinters have to be sentient to be considerate as such?
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He did clarify that Splinters don't have to be sentient to be Splinters.
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Answer the following question the ebst you can about Brandon Sanderson's works and the Cosmere
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Does it feel like your own work when you hear [a translation]? Is it recognizable in any way? What do the translations do with your work? I suppose you get a lot of questions by your translators about the magic, about invented words. How does this reflect on your writing?
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You know, I’m not sure if it changes the way I approach my writing at all. But I do find it fascinating. Hearing a reading, in particular, is in some ways, it’s a double interpretation. Because first, you have the translation to German. And then you have the narrator... will give an interpretation, as well. But one of the things about writing that I believe is that I’m not completing the story. What I do is, I write a script. And every person who reads that book is going to finish the story in their head. I give descriptions of the characters, but even with those descriptions, every person who reads the book is going to imagine those characters [in a] slightly different way. So I’ve always viewed myself, as a writer, as kind of like the screenwriter. Where the reader is the director, who’s going to finish the story. And I don’t think a book really lives until it’s been experienced by a reader. And so it doesn’t bother me, the idea of going through translators or getting different interpretations by the audiobook narrators, because I feel like my text is going to be interpreted by whoever experiences it, in different ways. And in some ways, as soon as it gets experienced by a reader, it becomes their story. They finish it, and it doesn’t really ‘come alive’ until they’ve done so. So, it’s not finished anyway. I think it’s just really cool. I like seeing fan art, even though each drawing of a character looks different from another one. It lets me see a little bit how that book was finished in that reader’s mind.
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