Theoryland of the Wheel of Time

So, here's my official future status, as I sometimes post.

BOOKS YOU WILL SEE SOON

* Towers of Midnight (November 2.)
* Alcatraz Versus the Shattered Lens (December 2010.)
—A note on Alcatraz. This is the fourth and final of the Alcatraz books in my contract. I do plan there to be more in this series, but I don't have time for them right now. And so, for now, this is going to stand as the ending of the series. I'll do Alcatraz Five eventually, I promise.
* Scribbler (Early 2012.)
—A note on Scribbler. This is a shorter steampunk book I wrote in 2007, just before I got the call about The Wheel of Time. It's quite good, and Tor has decided to purchase it. It involves chalk-based magic and a boy who is the son of the cleaning lady at a school for people who learn the chalk magic. I haven't had time to give it a revision, but will likely use some of the time in my free months between now and January to do a draft of it. If I turn it in January or February, you won't see it until a year after that, due to scheduling.

BOOKS YOU WILL SEE SOMEWHAT SOON

* A Memory of Light (March 2012.)
* Stormlight Archive Book Two (Late 2012 or early 2013.)
* Stormlight Archive Book Three (One year after Book Two.)

ANTICIPATED SEQUELS

* Alcatraz Five (Indefinite hiatus.)
* Elantris Two (Planned to be written after Stormlight Three.)
* Second Mistborn trilogy (It's coming someday, I promise.)
* Nightblood: Book two of Warbreaker (Coming someday.)
—Some notes here. Elantris has three books in the series, but they are loose sequels of each other. This means that side characters in one become main characters in the next. So while you'll see Raoden and Sarene in the second book, they won't be main characters. (Kiin's children will be.) Warbreaker is two books. Mistborn is a trilogy of trilogies, with the second trilogy in an urban (20th-century-level technology) setting. For Stormlight, I'm planning a pattern of two every three years, with a different epic—a standalone, or one of the sequels mentioned above—in between. Thus the Elantris sequel is next in line after Stormlight Three, which would be followed by Stormlight Four and Five.

MAYBE COMING SOMEDAY BUT ONLY PARTIALLY WRITTEN

* Dark One (YA dark fantasy.)
* Steelheart (Superhero apocalypse.)
* The King's Necromancer
* The Silence Divine (Shardworld novel, standalone.)
* White Sand (Shardworld trilogy.)
* The Liar of Partinel (Shardworld novel, one of two.)
* Dragonsteel (Major Shardworld epic. Won't be written until Stormlight is done.)

POSSIBLE PROJECTS FOR MY TIME OFF

* Mistborn short story (Looking likely.)
* Unnamed urban fantasy (This is what I'm working on right now. Watch Twitter/Facebook for updates on this story. It involves a necromancer pizza deliveryman as a protagonist.)
* Scribbler revisions (Will almost certainly be done.)
* Finishing one of the unfinished novels mentioned above (Not likely, but you never know.)

Who knows when/if anything written during my side-project time will get published. Sometimes, these stories are too unformed (as I like to be very free and loose when I write them) to make it. On other occasions, there isn't time to do revisions on them. (I write initial books very quickly, but spend many months in revision.) For instance, Alcatraz books were my deviations for 2005 and 2006, and the first of those came out very quickly. Scribbler was the one for 2007, and it won't be published for a year or so yet. I didn't have time for much in the way of deviations in 2008 or 2009, just the unfinished projects I mentioned above.

We shall see. As always, thank you for reading and supporting me in this compulsive writing addiction of mine.

Chris Treco

Brandon Sanderson

The second thing I tried writing was a short story set in the Mistborn world a few hundred years after The Hero of Ages. This one just didn't work; the characters weren't gripping for me. More importantly, it just didn't FEEL like a Mistborn book. I got about one scene into it.

As I was working on it, however, I did some worldbuilding on this time period in Scadrial's history. I got to thinking about what was wrong with the short story, and why it didn't feel right. This grew into an outline regarding a completely different story—with no overlap of characters—set in the same time period. I nurtured this and started writing, and it felt right from the get-go. I had the right tone, so I kept writing, expanding my outline, letting the story grow as big as it wanted to be.

In the end, I had an 85,000-word novel that I named Mistborn: The Alloy of Law. I'm very excited about the story, and I offered it to Tor for publication with one condition: They had to put it out in 2011. I've mentioned before that I worried I wasn't going to have a book release for you in 2011, what with the extra time A Memory of Light is going to take. Alloy of Law turned out so well that I wanted to share it with everyone, and use it to fill in the gap between Towers of Midnight and A Memory of Light.

You may have seen the Tor announcement on this book. It should come out this fall; I'd guess September or October. I want to reassure people that I didn't do this instead of writing the next Stormlight book. This time period between big books had to be used to write something shorter, something more self-contained. I just couldn't have done a Stormlight book. It was this novel or nothing. I'm pleased that Alloy of Law turned out so well.

I spent the next little while tweaking Alloy of Law. I did a writing exercise to practice dialogue, which I posted. I've actually got more of that than I posted. (Maybe five chapters' worth.) I'll try to post more of that in the weeks ahead. I also did some work on Steelheart, which is coming together—but slowly.

I'm through with all of that now, however, and as of Monday I'm working full-time on the Wheel of Time. I'll do another blog post on that here soon.

Theoryland

Upcoming book plans: A Memory of Light is first, of course; he expects to follow that with Book 2 of the Stormlight Archive in March or April 2013. Book 2 will have Shallan as the focus character (like Kaladin was in book 1), followed in subsequent books by Szeth, Navani and Dalinar. Once the first 5 Stormlight books are out, he plans to do the second Mistborn trilogy, then books 6-10 of Stormlight. Interspersed with the first 5 Stormlight books, he'll do several more Wax and Wayne books; similar to Alloy of Law, they'll be shorter, lighter, more witty & adventurous than the epics.

Warbreaker 2 will be another "in between" book; he plans to use the same process as the first Warbreaker, posting sections on his website and getting feedback, using a very open and interactive process of development.

Today I have a guest blog piece up over at the Tor/Forge blog entitled "My 14-Year-Old Self Might Take Issue with The Alloy of Law." Here's an excerpt:

As we get ready for the release of The Alloy of Law, I find myself wondering what the teenage me would think of what I'm doing in this book. You see, I became a fantasy addict when I was about fourteen, and one of my mantras quickly became, "If it has guns, it's not good fantasy."

Now here I am, adding guns to my most successful fantasy series.

Go read the piece, and then if you haven't yet checked out the sample chapters, read those too. Next Monday evening I'll head down to the BYU Bookstore for the midnight release of the book, and then I'm off on a whirlwind tour of the US, Vancouver, and the UK. Check my events calendar for details and to see if I'm coming near you. If you want an email reminder when I'm going to be near your city, tell me what city you're in (or the nearest large city you'd be willing to drive to).

One of my former students, shrain, has uploaded a video (below) of me talking about the concept behind the book and reading from the prologue and second chapter.

This may be new information to some readers, but I've mentioned several places before that the Mistborn series was pitched to my editor as a sequence of three trilogies. Past, present, and future—epic fantasy, urban fantasy, and science fiction; all with the running thread of the magic system.

Since I just started coming out with the Stormlight Archive, I want to commit myself to that and don't want to dig into the second Mistborn trilogy for quite a while. Yet I want to prep people for the idea that Mistborn is going to be around for a while, and they are going to be seeing more books. I didn't want it to just come out of nowhere at them in ten years or whenever I get to it. So I decided to do some interim stories.

One of the things I'd been playing with was the idea of what happened between the epic fantasy and the urban fantasy trilogies. We have some very interesting things happening in the world, where you've got a cradle of mankind created (by design) to be very lush, very easy to live in, so a great big city could grow up there relatively quickly; civilization could build itself back up over the course of just a couple of generations. Yet there would be very little motivation to leave that area at first, which I felt would mean that you'd end up with this really great frontier boundary. The dichotomy between the two—the frontier and the quite advanced (all things considered) city in the cradle of humanity—was very interesting to me. So I started playing around with where things would lead.

To worldbuild the urban fantasy trilogy coming up, I need to know everything that happened in the intervening centuries. Some stories popped up in there that I knew would happen, that would be referenced in the second trilogy. So I thought, why don't I tell some of these stories, to cement them in my mind and to keep the series going.

I started writing The Alloy of Law not really knowing how long it would be—knowing the history and everything that happened, but not knowing how much of it I wanted to do in prose form. Things just clicked as they sometimes do, and I ended up turning it into a novel.

I'd say more organic. I honestly don't look at it as much of a Western. The part that is in a Western setting, the prologue, is actually the last thing I wrote, feeling I needed a better introduction. Originally the story just started in the city.

As I said, I view it as a clash between these two concepts, the city and the frontier. Mistborn as a series has always been city-based, urban. I intend to keep it that way, mostly. The story here as I saw it was of the man who had been living out on the frontier for a long time who comes back and has to integrate into society. Which is another theme of the Mistborn books—just as in the original trilogy Vin had to go from the streets to upper society, I wondered what it would be like to deal with a character who had lived among the two-faced society of city politics and more or less rejected it, who gets pulled back against his will. So I would say it's less a Western and more a clash between that more simple, rugged lifestyle and the city lifestyle.

I don't generally sit down and say I'm going to write someone who's this archetype or that archetype. What I wanted for this book, honestly, was just to have fun. I love writing epic, awesome stories; I love stories that are full of deep character conflict and broad world-spanning conflict—but sometimes I just want to back away from that and have fun.

The Wax archetype with the sidekick—the two of them were built from the ground up to be characters who played off one another well to facilitate good banter. Because I like to write good banter. I like to read it, I like to enjoy it. Whether it's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, or Holmes and Watson or whatever—I get a kick out of these types of stories. So when I was writing this book, I was really just saying let's step back for a little while from the kind of stories I was writing with The Way of Kings and the Wheel of Time—which are both (I hope) very awesome, and deep, and complex—and let's do something that's just fun.

Neth

Brandon Sanderson

I've said that what I love about fantasy is that it can do anything any other genre can do, plus have that added sense of wonder. So I've wanted to explore different types of what fantasy can achieve. The steampunk movement is awesome for doing this. I don't actually consider this book to be steampunk, because the Victorian feel and steam technology aren't there, but it certainly is a cousin to what is happening in steampunk.

At its core, really what I've done is write a detective novel. A buddy detective novel set in an early 1900s industrial age equivalent, in a fantasy world where the epic fantasy that I wrote as a trilogy (Mistborn) has become the mythology for this new world. That concept excited me. What made me do it? The idea that I could, and that I hadn't really seen it done before. That's what fantasy is all about.

I think it's always been part of the mix. Dune, which is one of those hybrid fantasy/science fiction books, is all about this, and is—I would say—the great example of this. It's the foundation for a lot of modern science fiction and fantasy. A fantastic book, and it deals with the idea of how commerce affects a fantasy and science fiction world.

So I don't think it's a new trend, necessarily, but what is a new trend in fantasy is digging into nonstandard (for the genre) types of plots. Moving away from the quest narrative and focusing more on political intrigue, or focusing on the effects of different fantastical elements on a world and its economy. Basically, George R. R. Martin is going this way too, and he's been doing this for 15 years so I can't say that it's a new trend. But it certainly is an exciting direction for the fantasy genre.

One of the things that you have to remember is that I wrote Elantris back in 2000, so I have a much bigger head start than it looks like. I sold Elantris in 2003, and had all of 2003 up through a big part of 2006 to write the Mistborn trilogy before the first book of that came out. So what you're seeing is my big head start that I had by having that book already done, then launching right into the trilogy.

I don't think I write faster than any other fantasy writers, but I do write a lot. I love to do it; I spend a lot of time doing it, and it's one of my favorite things to do, to tell these stories. So if you want to bottle it, all you really do is spend ten hours a day writing, and boom, you've got it.

But it does look more impressive than it really is, because I have those extra years. A lot of the years where I had two books come out, I had written one much earlier and the other I wrote the year before. My popularity has made my publishers start increasing the publication schedule of some of my books, so you get overlap—a book I wrote long before and then a book I've recently turned in come out at the same time, because when I turn in the new book they want to publish it as soon as I can. So that's why this year, for instance, we only have one book—The Alloy of Law—and it's a very short book. That's because the publication schedule finally caught up to me.

In November, yes.

Shawn Speakman

Excellent. Why don't you tell us a little about it, and how you came to create it?

Brandon Sanderson

When I pitched the Mistborn series to Tor, I pitched it as a continuum, as a group of different smaller series set in a fantasy world that I... I had never seen it done before. That doesn't mean it hasn’t been done. Lots of things have been done. But I had never seen a series do a big epic fantasy trilogy, and then jump forward hundreds of years and have the technology have grown and changed. It seems like when we jump around in fantasy worlds, we're always kind of in the same tech level, and I wanted to do something different; I wanted to write this... The Mistborn trilogy is done and tied up, and it is an epic fantasy trilogy—I love how it turned out. Now I'm jumping forward hundreds of years and doing stories in the same world, with the magic still being around during the age of industry. And so this is a... This is guns and skyscrapers and cars and allomancers. Right about...equivalency of early 1900s. And so it's the dawn of electric power, and the dawn of motor cars and things like this. Kind of a clash between magic and the technology, and a guy who's kind of caught between the two.

Shawn Speakman

This sounds standalone-ish. Like a new person to Mistborn could actually jump into it and...

Brandon Sanderson

Yes, it's definitely a new jumping in point. It does not have major spoilers for the previous series. So it's one you can just read, and the first chapters are on Tor.com. We're pushing the... We're publishing the first five on the website, so people can just go read them there.

Shawn Speakman

Will you be touring?

Brandon Sanderson

I will be. I'll be doing a tour in the US and in the UK.

Shawn Speakman

Because the Wheel of Time book will be turned in?

Brandon Sanderson

Yes. The Wheel of Time book is turned in, and then I go on tour.

Shawn Speakman

Excellent.

The Inquisitor at the end is indeed Marsh. He stayed alive using the same trick that TLR used.

ZAS

I said that I actually had a related question.

BRANDON SANDERSON

He said "Oh, do you want to ask why Marsh has a Feruchemical Atium spike?"

ZAS

I blinked, and said that my question was actually "Why did Bloody Tan see Ten-Soon (as the Survivor) and Marsh (as Ironeyes)?"

BRANDON SANDERSON

He said that he was not answering any questions on what Bloody Tan saw, or thought he saw.

ZAS

I then said, "But now that you mention it, why does Marsh have a Feruchemical Atium spike?"

BRANDON SANDERSON

He told me "You'll have to figure that out! Good job on getting two RAFOs in a row!"

By the way, allomancers fighting on a train? Very cool.

Oh thank you. I almost didn’t put that scene in, because it’s kind of a cliché, but then I’m like “I’ve gotta have a train fight.” And I’ll say this, Alloy of Law is intended to be slightly more of a pulp novel than Mistborn, and though even though it’s sort of a detective pulp novel, it’s got fun characters and a fun world, because that’s the way I do it. If I let myself do these sort of things, they are done for the pure fun of it, where they may not have fit in another book.

People are going crazy wondering if there are telegraphs and telephones in Alloy of Law. Are there? And if not, why?

There are not yet. And the reason why is because they haven’t needed them yet. Necessity is the, what the fuel of invention?

MEMBER OF AUDIENCE

The mother of invention.

BRANDON SANDERSON

Yes, the mother of invention, and they have messengers who run, Coinshots who are very fast. They also do basically don’t need to go outside the City, and haven’t for a long time. They’re close, but they haven’t invented them yet for the same reason that they have very poor navigation techniques. Why do you need to ship anything or sail anywhere when you have some idyllic paradise to live in? And you have allomancers, who in some ways are preventing from achieving that next level, because a Coinshot can get it there really fast, and so you’re only waiting a few minutes for them to come back with your message, so it can actually stifle a little bit of technology by having a not-quite-as-good magical solution.

Time bubbles don’t move, so it would pull you out of it, then it would vanish.

MI'CHELLE

If you were to pop up a time bubble and someone were to be stuck halfway in and halfway out, would they go splooch?

BRANDON SANDERSON

No, they would be in the time bubble. The time bubbles will move with the planet but not with the train.

AUDIENCE

Yeah, I always thought it was relative to the person creating the time bubble.

BRANDON SANDERSON

No, you’ll see Wayne create one, then he’ll walk up to the perimeter, but if he leaves it, it ruins the time bubble.

ZAS

So is that because it’s linked up to the spiritual gravitational bond between the planet?

BRANDON SANDERSON

Yes, and you’re digging very deeply into stuff that I now can’t answer. Time bubbles have some weirdness to them that I don’t want to dig in too deeply, but yes.

At the end of Alloy of Law, when...

Spoiler! Talk circumloqutically, talk around it.

QUESTION

When that person said that thing at the end of the book, will that lead to future ideas of books?

BRANDON SANDERSON

Things in the Alloy of Law are foreshadowing things that will happen in the modern day Mistborn trilogy.

What happens if you create a time bubble in a time bubble?

Lots of people are theorizing about that. The time bubble would not collapse, I’ll answer that much.

ZAS

I think that you said at the Alloy release that it was mul—de...

BRANDON SANDERSON

Multiplicitive?

ZAS

Yeah.

BRANDON SANDERSON

I may have given an answer to that or not. I’m not going to say anything about that. Time travel and find out.

Alloy of Law release

Uh—oh.

MEMBER OF AUDIENCE

THis is a very very minor spoiler. It's just a statement that was made in Alloy of Law, that Smokers could...

BRANDON SANDERSON

Oh yeah, that was just a typo.

MEMBER OF AUDIENCE

Is that going to change things?

BRANDON SANDERSON

Wait, go ahead and say it.

MEMBER OF AUDIENCE

Can Copperclouds shield others' emotions?

BRANDON SANDERSON

Oh okay. Did we put that in Alloy of Law in the Ars Arcanum? Is that wwhere you read it?

MEMBER OF AUDIENCE

I forget. I don't remember where it is.

BRANDON SANDERSON

I believe it’s in the Ars Arcanum, which in Alloy of Law was put together by Peter. And that’s mostly a mistake, though the thing is the Role Playing Game came to me and said “Is it feasible that this could happen?” And I said “It’s perhaps feasible, but only a very rare individual could make this work if they knew exactly what they were doing.” And so I said “Yeah, go ahead, but make it a power that someone really has to know what they’re doing to make it work.” And so they put it in, and so Peter assumed that it was canon, that anyone can do it, but that’s not what I intended.

MEMBER OF AUDIENCE

So would it be easier to say that somebody discovered they could do it and now they are training copperclouds to do it?

BRANDON SANDERSON

I would say that it is viable that someone could figure it out, but it would be a very difficult thing to train, and it is not a common Coppercloud—A common Coppercloud isn’t going to be able to be doing it, and almost no Mistborn will ever be capable of doing it, they just don’t focus on that metal enough to learn it. Of course, there aren’t Mistborn around anymore. So it is a possible power, it is plausible, but it is not the standard. Perhaps I will allow it to become the standard eventually, but it’s not right now. It would be much easier to wear a tinfoil hat. (laughter) Aluminum, aluminum. Which does work.

Which I did catch was very entertaining to see like that [regarding the Aluminum Hats].

I built aluminum to do all sorts of funky things to all the powers, and I actually hadn’t made the connection of tinfoil hats until after I’d built it in, and I was writing it in Alloy of Law, years after I built it in, saying “Wait a minute! I just put tinfoil hats in the book!” (laughter) So I actually built that without thinking that there would be a joke to that.

How does Snapping work now? You said that Sazed changed it.

Uh, RAFO. That is a good question though.

QUESTION

Not even a little hint?

BRANDON SANDERSON

Nah, I don't think so.

So what happens if you have a Bendalloy bubble, and then another Bendalloy bubble inside of it?

It will compound and double, and it will multiply. Bendalloy is one of the metals from Alloy of Law if you haven’t read it, as this person obviously has, or has read the Ars Arcanum, you’ll find out what it does.

Does Iron store mass or weight?

Excellent question. The thing is it really does involve mass, but I’m breaking some physics rules, basically. I have to break a number of physics rules in order to make Magic work in the first place. Those whole laws of Thermodynamics, I’m like “You are my bane!” (laughter) But I try to work within the framework, and I have reasonings built up for myself, and some of them have to be kind of arbitrary. But the thing is, it does store mass if you look at how it interacts, but when a Feruchemist punches someone, you’re not having a mass transference of a 1000 pounds transferring the mass into someone else.

So there are a few little tweaks. You can go talk to Peter, because Peter has the actual math. Oh Peter’s back there. Peter is dressed up as Allomancer Jak from the broadsheet. In fact we’re giving some out broadsheets, aren’t we Peter. So when you come through the line, we’re giving out Broadsheets. Please don’t take fifty—I think we might have enough for everybody. The broadsheets are the newspaper from the Alloy of Law time. It’s an inworld newspaper. It’s actually reproduced in the book in four different pages, and we put it together in one big broadsheet.

So anyway, you can talk with him, he’s got more of the math of it. I explained the concept to Peter and he’s better with the actual math, so he said “We’ll figure it out.”

How many Feruchemical powers have you revealed in the Alloy of Law?

In the Ars Arcanum in the back, I have revealed them all. I have not explained them all. (laughter), But I have revealed them all, they are in the back, so you are free to theorize what they mean.

With the Alloy of Law being more Steampunk-style, and your genre of choice being fantasy, what things have you done differently in this book than in your previous ones?

Just a quick caveat—I don’t really view Alloy of Law as being Steampunk, but they put goggles on the cover, because Steampunk’s really popular, but I don’t view it as being Steampunk because it doesn’t fit the Victorian feel. It’s much more Edwardian, it’s later era, the book is really based off of 1910 New York, the feel and the culture that is there, but it’s really a Mistborn book. I think when you read it, you’ll feel that it’s more a Mistborn book than it is a Steampunk, or a Western, or anything else. It’s Mistborn. It’s Allomancers with Guns instead. (laughter)

So what have I done differently? I really wanted it to feel like a Mistborn book, with some new elements. It’s really more of a Sherlock Holmes feel than anything else, because I wanted the mystery feel, and I wanted the character dynamic deal with things like that, so this was just a conscious choice to have two or three compelling main characters be in a more episodic story, and I was more focused on that than if it’s Steampunk, or whether this is what, I really want this thematically to feel like a Mistborn book.

These are things that I overheard.

Kelsier was not spiked.

Part of the Lord Ruler's motivation for setting up The Final Empire was revenge against the people he viewed as encroaching on his people's land. He was also obsessed with creating order, which Ruin later exploited.

The Ars Arcanum in the books were all written by one person.

The author of the Ars Arcanum is either Hoid or a member of the Seventeenth Shard. Brandon also pointed to an annotation on the map of Elendel that's relevant to this question.

There's just the one system in Warbreaker, and it's also a world with only one Shard on it.

Watch for what happens when something leaves a bendalloy bubble.

ALLOY OF LAW READING
Brandon took a quick poll, and the majority wanted him to read from Alloy of Law (I voted for Steel Heart, his self-styled "superhero apocalypse book," but I wasn't too upset at the loss). Brandon took up the entire 45 minute slot reading. He read the entire prologue, summarized the events of chapter 1, and read half of chapter 2.

I'm not a professional book reviewer, and I'm clearly biased, but Alloy of Law is freaking amazing. It is able to go from touching, to exciting, to hilarious, to disturbing smoothly and believably. Seriously, it's some of the best dialogue I've seen from Brandon (and that's including Lightsong in Warbreaker).

I recorded the entire session and, should we get approval to post it (I could understand if Peter would rather we didn't), I'll upload it here. Until then (or instead of that, should we get a "no") here are some details that I recalled on the ride home (no cheating, Peter. I promise!)

- We deal with a bendalloy (Allomantic)/gold (Feruchemical) Twinborn in addition to Wax's steel/iron combo
- The nickname for a iron Feruchemist is a "Slider"
- A nickname for Sazed is "Harmony" (I think)
- The events in the first trilogy have spawned 2 religions: Survivorism (der) and Pathism (followers of Sazed, unless I completely misread things)
- Bendalloy has some very interesting rules/restrictions: once a time bubble is created, it cannot be moved; I had always thought it would follow the misting around as they moved) entering/exiting a time bubble has some interesting effects. You can't shoot out of it, because objects entering/leaving the bendalloy bubble (especially those at high velocity) have some strange kind of conservation-of-energy-like effect, where they gain some kind of spin and ricochet in a different direction. I can't help but extrapolate what this means for individuals trying to enter/leave the stationary bubble. Maybe if it's done slowly (like with a shield in Dune), it's OK. We'll have to theorize on that until the novel comes out.
- [This one might already be known, but it sounded new to me] The third Mistborn trilogy will be sci-fi, involving space travel. Crossovers, anyone? This might be the beginning of the final stage of Unity

After he signed my book, I asked him a few questions and got the following nuggets (some of these were also overheard in his discussions with other people):

I messaged earlier regarding Alloy of Law appendix narrator, unaware of today's torchat. maybe you can respond in the chat?

I haven't been telling people the name of the appendix author. It is either Hoid or one of the 17th sharders.

Was Bloody Tan an atium misting?

No, he was not. Good question.

What exactly is a dueling cane anyhow?

Depends. Some are flexible, like sparring swords, and are used for duels where blood is not needed.

Others are basically a big length of wood for hitting people, like a tonfa without the grip.

ERICPETERS

Do canes have a hilt like a sparring sword then? I always picture something like pic being used

BRANDON SANDERSON

Many have a hilt. However for most, there is no crossguard or the like.

And most don't taper like that one. They are often of a uniform diameter all the way down.

Kel said he ended atium production for a few hundred years. Will atium reappear in Alloy and such, or did Sazed move the Pits?

RAFO. :)

In Alloy of Law are people still Snapping?

Sazed chose to alter the way Snapping works. It bothered him. It does happen, but differently.

it seems that The Lord Ruler still needed to store age "normally" but less. Did Miles ever have to store healing?

Yes. He did, but not in the normal way.

'IronEyes' at the end of Alloy of Law is actually Marsh? It could be any kandra could it not?

It could be a kandra, but I will tell you specifically that this time it is not. It is him.

At the end of Alloy of Law, Marsh tells Marasi, that Wax is doing "his brothers work". Does this mean Kelsier is still meddling, or is this a continuation of his initial legacy?

Kelsier has never been good at doing what he's told. He's still interfering.

The Stormlight Archive is going to be in two 5-book arcs; will there be a big gap between these (story time wise)?

He said there would be a small gap, nothing as big as Mistborn and Alloy of Law, but it would be there.

Is the size of speed bubbles affected by the strength of the allomancer?

Yes.

Is Officer Brettin Tensoon at the end of the book?

Yes. (He let on during the signing that TenSoon made an appearance, and my friend Joe guessed it was Brettin, and Brandon confirmed it then later to us)

Oh, and another little tidbit,

The person who gave Wax his earring was the kandra, MeLaan.

Also, that Kandra are working as "Sazed's Angels". And their role is primarily to go along fixing things by Sazed's Will. Brettin was killed towards the end of the book, but not in the storyline related plot. Sazed saw this, and told Tensoon to go get his bones, which is why he wasnt able to imitate him properly.

The person who wrote the Ars Arcanum in Alloy of Law, is that the same person who wrote the Letter in Way of Kings.

Its not confirmed, but it's either Hoid, or someone in the 17th Shard. (However, thinking back, I'm not sure if he fully heard/understood the question, and perhaps he was expecting it to be something else. But it seems to me that if he namedropped Hoid, that he may have misunderstood the question, as it seems very likely that Hoid wrote the Letter, I dont think he'd let something slip like that. So i would count this information as rather tenuous.)

One person asked what metal Wax's earring was made of.

He wouldn't say which metal, however he did confirm that it does have a "slight hemalurgic charge".

I just wanted to say ... I like how the main characters are named Wax and Wayne.

Thanks. In all honesty, I was hesitant about the pun. I liked it, on one hand, but also worried that it was too goofy. By the time I tried changing the character names, however, they were too strongly cemented in my head, so changing them proved too difficult and I just left them as-is.

The Alloy of Law left me wanting more books in the universe right away. Any hints as to when we might get to see the next trilogy?

My current plan is to hold out on the second trilogy until I've reached a breaking point in the Stormlight Archive. (So after book five.) My reasoning is that the second trilogy is very involved, and I'm not certain if I want two thick-booked series going at once. There is a good chance I'll return and do another shorter book, like this one, in the world before then. Either about Wax, or perhaps a quick glimpse of the southern continent.

MORGHUS (REDDIT.com)

That's awesome! I really enjoyed both worlds, but right now the Stormlight Archive is the one that got me totally hooked. How was the reception for the first Stormlight compared to Alloy of Law? :)

BRANDON SANDERSON (REDDIT.com)

I would say the reception is about what I hoped. The Way of Kings has made much more of an impact, as I would hope would be the case. A book that is the result of many years of effort compared to a fun diversion...well, I would be worried if Alloy of Law had been the one everyone latched onto.

That said, I've been very pleased with the reception to Alloy of Law. The sales are strong, and most people seem to be enjoying it for what it is rather than expecting it to be something it is not.

Hey Brandon! As much as I want to fan-gush, I'll keep it short so you can get back to your A Memory of Light drafting.

How was Sazed/Harmony able to communicate with Waxillium near the end of the book? During the original trilogy, Ruin could occasionally implant thoughts into people's minds, but he couldn't just listen in whenever he felt like it. Is Harmony just way more powerful?

There is interesting discussion about this one below, which I like to see. I thought this might spark some discussion. Remember that human beings were given more of preservation than Ruin during their creation, which led to Preservation eventually being overwhelmed by Ruin. That was the bargain; people would be of preservation at their core, but in turn Ruin got to claim the world once Preservation wound down.

Another factor to consider here is that Wax was given a special earring designed for communication with a being that he actually worships.

Who wrote the "Ars Arcanum"? Since the writer obviously had knowledge of the Cosmere I assumed that it was you making an editorial note, but then I thought that it could be Hoid (who was suspiciously absent) or Sazed or any Shardbearer... Does that make sense at all?

The Ars Arcanum is written in-cosmere by someone, but I don't want to saw who yet.

Not really a question, but the one thing that disappointed me was that you didn't come up with new slang names for Allomancers! After three hundred years, do you really think they would still be calling steel mistings "coinshots"?

Anyway, thanks for doing this and keep up the good work.

I toyed with this one, but decided that I would keep them the same for a few reasons. First off, I felt that certain things in-world would hamper some linquistic diversity. (Having the books Sazed left behind as a guide to Allomancy and history, everyone living in a small geographic area, the semi-religious nature of Allomancy making people look at it in traditional ways.) So, while I advanced the slang of the world, some of the terms I decided to leave the same.

Another reason for this came when I was writing the book. At first, I experimented with greater linguistic diversity—I even tried a vowel shift, as I figured three hundred years might be enough for that. In the end, I pulled back. I was already worried that this book not feel "Mistborn" enough, and so I wanted some direct ties back to the original series. Fiddling too much with the language while changing the setting and characters so drastically felt like a mistake to me.

Is it significant that Miles said that the "men of gold and red" would come and rule? Is there a connection between this and the "gold and red" cigar box that Miles keeps The Suit's comings and goings on?

This is all very significant.

How long before Way of Kings is Alloy of Law? I heard somewhere that it's a hundred years, but I don't think that's right.

I intended them to be happening roughly close to one another, with Way of Kings slightly before.

That's Alloy of Law. Alloy of Law takes place several hundred years following the events of Hero of Ages. This was always the plan with the Mistborn series; I pitched it to my editor as a sequence of series set in the same world with an evolution of technology, which is not something I'd seen done very much in fantasy books—letting the technology process and seeing how magic interacts with it. Alloy of Law is the story of a man named Waxillium who has spent the last twenty years living out in the Roughs being a lawman. And his uncle dies, and we find out that Waxillium is actually the heir to his house. And back in the city of Elendel, they've got this sort of half lordship, half elected body that leads the government, and he has inherited a seat in this body and responsibility for thousands of people who work in his house. And so he has to leave the life of a lawman and come back to the city—which is patterned after 1910 New York—and live among, you know, the elite of the city. And yet he's kind of an unpolished sort of guy, having been out in the Roughs all this time. And it's his story, trying to make sense of this world. It's also a mystery; it's a very fast-paced sort of mystery, kind of... Imagine it this way, as I have been describing it lately. Imagine the Sherlock Holmes story. Now replace Sherlock Holmes with Clint Eastwood and add magic. And that's what you've got.

Marc Aplin

Excellent.

Letting go of the original trilogy will be kind of hard. But in some ways, it'll have to. Because the original trilogy has become the mythology and lore of the world, which is really fun to work with as a writer. Beyond that, there are continuing characters. There was always planned to be continuing characters. I can't say much without giving spoilers, but there are characters from the original trilogy appearing in this book, several of them. Some of them are hidden. You're going to have to search and figure out who's who. Some of them are less hidden.

In the future, the second trilogy's going to be one that deals with a... By this point, in the world—and Alloy of Law is the same case—there are no Mistborn anymore. There are only Mistings, for various reasons that I don't want to give spoilers on, but there are Mistings. The second trilogy happens in a modern setting when we get to that. Alloy of Law is in an industrial setting. In the modern setting, there we will be doing a story eventually about a Mistborn serial killer and a SWAT team of Allomancers who... We're talking people with machine guns and, you know, Navy SEAL Allomancers whose job it is to hunt down Allomancer criminals, and then they'll reveal something, um...unexpected, how about that.

Marc Aplin

Right.

Why on earth does Marsh have a Feruchemical Atium Spike? You've said that Ironeyes is in fact Marsh. Did Ruin spike someone for him? Or did Sazed grant him the power?

Dead inquisitors Vin killed. Some were granted the spike for reasons I haven't spoken of yet.

A little safer question- Why did you not have Waxillium fall for Marasi? Why stick with the contract with Steris?

Marasi, as she was in Alloy of Law, was just plain wrong for Wax. As I write books, I allow my characters to grow more free-form (while my setting and plot are outlined in detail.) In writing the book, I felt that a Marasi hook-up at the end would not only be wrong for the character, but wrong for the story. If I do direct sequels (which I probably will) perhaps things will change.

I have my own theory but I thought I should ask, if the koloss reproduce through hemalurgic spike's how can there be half koloss in Alloy of law.

I am holding this answer back for future books, I'm afraid. I have said some things, but the full truth is still subject to debate. I will answer this eventually in the books.

As I read the book (The Alloy of Law) I started to get a very strong vibe of western combined with a Sherlock Holmes rip-off. Then I realized I was being a whinging baby and decided that such a thing was awesome. (And not a rip-off really, and probably intended.) Did you have moments like that yourself or is that part of the normal creative process for a writer anyway?

When I write a book on a whim like this one, my influences (such as the ones you mention) tend to be more overt. I don't have the time to refine the influences and distill out the essence of the story and really, REALLY put my stamp on it. I didn't mind it here, since my goal was to just write a fun story, even more of a pulp type story.

I wanted to do something along the lines of what Lucas and Spielberg originally did with Indiana Jones--that is look at some of their powerful influences, then write an action-adventure story that played off what had come before. This was a dangerous road, since Mistborn had been about subverting tropes before. I wanted Mistborn to be more than that, however. I wanted to simplify for this series while expanding its scope, if that makes any sense.

What you talk about was actually my biggest worry for the book. I tried to prepare people, and tell them that this was more pulp, more fun than anything else. Part of my desire to do this was to let myself blow off some steam from other books, TWoK and the WoT, which are more serious and solemn. I worry a little about fantasy (particularly epic fantasy) becoming too self-important. Sometimes, it should be okay to just have a fun adventure story.

Anyway, in answer to your question, yes I thought about it and I do have moments like that. Often, they worry me, and so I set about refining out the influences. In this case, I didn't let myself worry as much.

What would it take for me to successfully bribe you into writing a sequel to Alloy? I think you may have answered this one before, but where do you come up with your names for all your characters? Thank you! I really love your work.

I will probably do one anyway.

It depends on the series. For Mistborn, I build a 'feel for certain regions and develop names using the linguistic rules of that region. The Central Dominance (and Elendel in this book) had a slightly French feel to the linguistics, and many of the names came from that paradigm.

However, unique to the Mistborn world was the need to give people simple nicknames in a thieving crew sort of way. Wax, Clubs, Breeze, Mr. Suit, all of these are along those lines.

I'm not sure how free we are around here with spoilers regarding the Mistborn trilogy, so I'll try my best to avoid anything that will get me strung up.

The Mistborn trilogy left everything on the table, so to speak, with regards to the validity of a particular religion and its deitie(s). I worried the final scenario left no room for other religions to manifest in that world thereafter, and yet here we have Alloy of Law, which involved a few different religions (some of which we -the readers- know to be false) and somehow it seemed to work. My questions are:

1.What were some general challenges that you had to deal with when establishing the religious backdrop of the story?

2.Though you include brief examples of interaction with a deity in the novel, can you further explain some of the limits of that deity's ability to interact with the world in which the story takes place? The brief explanation in the novel seemed rushed. Then again, there didn't seem to be room for much philosophical debate during the awesome actions scenes.

Thank you for taking the time out of your day to deal with questions like these.

You covered the biggest challenge. However, you have to remember that as a religious person, I do believe in God in our world--and we have a ton of religions, many of which are related and interpreting the same concepts and scriptures in many different ways.

As for this deity, you're right--this book didn't have the space for a lot of philosophy. However, I can get into it a little bit here. He does not interact partially because of his innate nature, which allows him to see many different sides of a lot of different debates and activities. On the other hand, I am a firm believer that the nature of free will demands people to actually be given opportunities to make decisions. Stopping them just before, ala Minority Report, doesn't cut it for me. So, the deity in question feels he must be very careful about direct involvement, instead letting people act and react--and letting choices be made.

That said, I want him to be involved. Just more in a "I give people the tools they need to accomplish goodness," rather than "I'll just step in and make sure everyone does everything right."

I was just rambling on r/WoT about how awesome you are but yeah. Awesome.

Will there be a sequel to Alloy of Law? It felt like there would be but I want to know for sure lol

Are Allomancer more or less common than in the time of the survivor?

First one: Yes, most likely.

Second one: They are more common, but slightly less powerful.

I was a little confused about how this book ties in with the other Mistborn books that you have planned. Wikipedia states that you're planning a "trilogy of trilogies" and that Alloy is a stand alone novel. I thought it was odd that it ended with something of a cliffhanger. Can you tell us then... Can we expect to see these characters again someday? Or is it the mystery/conspiracy aspect that will carry over to future books? Both maybe?

Thanks so much for the stories! Any nibbling from Hollywood for adaptations yet? It's not often that you find a good story that has both a compelling plot and interesting action to go with it. I think a Mistborn movie would be quite a sight to see. :)

I do plan to do more Wax and Wayne. The second trilogy is very involved, and I don't think will be a good balance to the Stormlight books. However, I don't want to leave Mistborn alone, as I have so many plans for the rest of the series. Therefore, I decided some smaller novels like this one would be appropriate while the majority of my attention is on the Stormlight Archive.

The Mistborn film is trudging along, bit by bit. The latest screenplay should come to me in the next month or so. We have a shot, but it's still a slim one. More than nibbles (I've sold rights to some producers) but no studio involvement or major talent attached quite yet.

How did you channel that much snark and oddball humor for Wayne without going a little crazy?

Characters like him actually provide a snark outlet for me, so that it can be very cathartic to write them.

So the number 16 is importanton Scadrial, on pg 245, Wax is trying to find out where Miles is going to be next and he writes down the number "35.17" I couldn't help but notice that the 3+5+1+7=16, was that intentional or am I seeing things that aren't really there?

I slip it in here and there for fun, but it isn't actually important. It is fun when people notice it, though.

We have conflicting reports on chronology. Is this right, or is this right?

The second. I revised my placement of KINGS relative to HERO after realizing a behind-the-scenes conflict.

ALLOY had to happen after KINGS for Cosmere reasons. I had two timelines arguing, and in plotting Stormlight 2, I fixed this.

Just wanted to say, great work on the book. It kept me completely occupied from around 11 am to 8 pm and I have got to say that it had the most well thought out ending ever put into a book.

Also, do you have any plans for more Mistborn books? Or is this the end?

Okay, I was expecting these. Let's get to them first.

More Mistborn Books

My plans right now are to do a second trilogy of Mistborn books set several hundred years after the events of the first series. That means that technology would have progressed, and there's a good chance I'll decide to do the books as kind of an urban fantasy. (But set in a completely different world from our own, so not quite like other urban fantasies.) Guns, skyscrapers, cars—and Allomancy.

Now, I'm not 100% decided on that. I know that adding modern technology ruins the fantasy flavor of a book for many people, so I'll have to think about it. But I think the imagery would be compelling, and I would love to deal with a 'modern' world where the events of this trilogy form the foundation for the religions, history, and society of the book. It would be a really challenge, since I'd have to decide how technology and society developed following this book.

Marsh is alive. I changed this from when I talked to [Peter]. I realized some things about his use of Allomancy that would allow him to survive. Actually, he is immortal. He can pull off the same Allomancy/Feruchemy trick that the Lord Ruler did. (And he knows it too, since he was there when Sazed explained how it was done in Book One.) He's actually the only living person who actually knows this trick for certain. (Though there's a chance that Spook, Ham and Breeze heard about it from Vin and the others.) So yes, if there were another series, Marsh would make an appearance.

DOUGLAS

I thought that trick required atium and involved burning the atium. With all the atium gone and Sazed not making any more, it would therefore not be possible even for a full mistborn/feruchemist. Am I wrong, is Sazed providing atium specifically for Marsh to allow a friend and valuable servant to survive, or what?

BRANDON SANDERSON

Marsh has the bag of Atium that KanPaar sent to be sold, as well as several nuggets in his stomach. So, I guess 'immortal' is the wrong phrase. He's got the only remaining atium in the world and can keep himself around for a long, long while—but he WILL eventually run out. Unless Sazed does something.

The last two metals are Chromium and Nicrosil. We'll reveal what they do on the Allomancy poster. Suffice it to say that in the next trilogy, the main protagonist would be a Nicrosil Misting. And, to make a Robert Jordan-type comment, what those two metals do should become obvious to the serious student of Allomancy... (It has to do with the nature of the metal groupings.)

HAPPYMAN

If I read the poster correctly, and have the correlations down, these metals are the external enhancement metals.

The simplest idea is that they do to another person what Aluminum and Duralumin do to the Allomancer burning them. If this is true, then Chromium would destroy another Allomancer's metals (useful skill, that, especially in a group of Mistings fighting a Mistborn) while Nicrosil would cause the target's metals that are currently burning to be burned in a brief, intense flash. This could be used either to enhance a group of Mistings or to seriously mess up an enemy Allomancer.

PETER AHLSTROM

The other metals do not have exact one-to-one power correlations like that, so it seems more likely to me that they would work differently. It could be like an area effect weakening or enhancing spell. You would want an enhancer in your party, and you wouldn't want to go up against a weakener.

Nicrosil is a rather more complicated alloy than the others. It's an interesting one to pick, rather than something simpler like nichrome (though I guess that's actually a brand name).

BRANDON SANDERSON

Nicely done.

Ookla is right, the others don't have 1/1 correlations. But I liked this concept far too much not to use it.

In a future book series, Mistborn will also have become things of legend. The bloodlines will have become diluted to the point that there are no Mistborn, only Mistings—however, the latter are far more common. In this environment, a Nicrosil Misting could be invaluable both as an enhancer to your own team or a weapon to use against unsuspecting other Mistings.

DOUGLAS (17 OCTOBER)

I take it either Spook did not have children or Sazed made him a reduced-strength Mistborn rather than giving him the full potency of the 9 originals and Elend?

BRANDON SANDERSON

Spook is a reduced power Mistborn.

CHAOS (16 OCTOBER)

Very interesting about the Nicrosil.

So, if there is no more atium, then that would mean in any future trilogy, there would only be 14 metals, right? Somehow, that doesn't seem right, but maybe that is because it irks me that one quartet to be left incomplete with the absence of atium.

Would it be possible for Sazed to create a replacement metal, by chance, or will the temporal quartet remain inherently empty? It doesn't seem like it's too far of a stretch for Sazed to make more metals: after all, the metal Elend ate was a fragment of Preservation, and now Sazed holds Preservation.

BRANDON SANDERSON

That's a RAFO, I'm afraid. Suffice it to say that what the characters think they understand about the metals, they don't QUITE get right. If you study the interaction between the temporal metals, you might notice an inconsistency in the way they work...

PETER AHLSTROM

Uh-huh. That was already noticed by theorizers in the forums here. Gold works like Malatium and Electrum works like Atium. Yet they're on opposite corners of the metal square.

BRANDON SANDERSON

Ah. I wondered if that had been noticed.

Way back as early as when I was working on Well of Ascension, I mentioned to some readers that Mistborn was conceived as a trilogy of trilogies. The reason I wanted to do that was because I was fascinated by the idea of building a fantasy world, then showing it hundreds of years in the future when technology has advanced. Fantasy worlds rarely seem to get to have technological advancement. (The Wheel of Time, it should be noted, is a nice exception to this.)

I loved the idea of thinking about how a magic system, as established in a fantasy world, could change in purpose and use as it interacted with Technology. I loved the idea of a non-static fantasy world. Beyond that, I couldn't think of a major fantasy work that had done something like this—writing a complete series, then jumping ahead hundreds of years to show the same world, only in a more 20th century technology. Then jumping ahead again, and doing a science fiction series set in the same world. (Note that I'm pretty sure someone HAS done it; I'm certainly not the only one to think of this. I just hadn't read one that did it. And, whenever I consider something like that, it makes me want to do it myself.)

Anyway, that's all backstory. The story I'm working on right now, during my "Write whatever you want" break before starting A Memory of Light, isn't one of the three trilogies. It's a shorter work set between the Vin/Elend trilogy and the mid-20th century tech level trilogy. It takes place a few centuries after The Hero of Ages, where most technology (though not all) is somewhere close to 1910 on Earth. The advent of automobiles and widespread electricity. Plus Allomancers.

It involves a lawkeeper from the frontiers of the world who returns to the city to take over leadership of his house after the death of his uncle and cousin. He gets pulled into something he wasn't expecting. (And yes, it does show off some of the unexplored Allomantic powers.)

Whether you'll see more like this from me in the future really depends on how well the experience goes, and whether readers like it. It will be short—for me. Which is looking like around 60k words, at this point—so a short novel, rather than a short story.

Last time we spoke, we were talking about the 45-hour audiobook for The Way of Kings. Each of the Mistborn books came in at 25-30 hours, but The Alloy of Law comes in at a tidy 9 discs. Did you set out to write a shorter book?

I knew I wanted to do more in the Mistborn world, and for a long time I played with writing a short story. The short story that I tried to write didn't work; I tossed it aside after maybe a thousand words, and began working on a different story. I can usually judge what the length of a story will be, and I knew this one would be longer, but I wasn't sure how long I would want it to be, or whether I should make it a full-blown novel. So I wrote what turned out to be three or four chapters' worth, and at that point I decided, it was a big enough story to can make a novel of it. I knew it wasn't going to be the same length as the original Mistborn books, but I felt okay with that, because for a long time I've been wanting to start writing some—I don't want to say shorter, but quicker, faster-paced stories; thrilleresque, maybe a little more pulpish. I just think of it as a fun book, that doesn't require quite as much of an investment of time and energy for the reader as something like The Way of Kings—which I love, but I want to be doing a variety of things. So writing a shorter book was intentional, but I kind of slipped into it.

How much did you focus on writing The Alloy of Law as a starting point for readers who were new to Mistborn? Was it hard to balance writing for new readers versus wanting to give your existing readers a "welcome home"?

It takes place hundreds of years after the trilogy, so there was enough that I had to bring longtime readers up to speed on that it felt very natural to write the book as a potential new starting point, just because the world had been updated so much.

That said, I did make sure to slip in lots of fun things for those who had read the original trilogy, that are callbacks or that show how the world got updated and how it grew. I was conscious of the book possibly being a new starting point, but it's more that it felt natural for what the story required, as opposed to me sitting down and trying to force the book to be a new starting point.

Wayne's ability to mimic and create accents is used to great effect in the book, and Michael Kramer really shines in bringing these accents to life in the audiobook. Did you have a sense when writing the book that these could be challenging—and rewarding—scenes when read?

I certainly did. The thing is, I'm not good with talking in accents myself—I can hear them in my head, but I'm atrocious at trying to do them. So while I was writing the book, I was thinking in the back of my mind, "I really hope that poor Michael can pull this off." It was a lot of fun to write Wayne's accents. I'm writing in a world that isn't our world, but the Mistborn world is a bit of an Earth analogue. I intentionally used themes that make it an Earth parallel, which is different from my other worlds. So you can have a character who kind of has a light Cockney accent or something like that, but it's not our world so it can't exactly mimic that accent. So it's already a challenge in that respect. I do think Michael did a fantastic job.

A lot happens before this book opens—how did you pick an opening for Wax's story, leaving so much of the backstory with Wayne (and others) to be picked up and absorbed on the fly?

I usually like to start my books in medias res to an extent. It brings across the sense that I want to portray, which is that the characters all existed before the book started, and the characters continue—those who survive—to exist after the book ends. That helps with the sense of immersion. Granted, each book tells about a very important chapter of the characters' lives, and there's a distinct beginning, middle, and end to that chapter, but if the beginning or end are too hard and fast, it feels contrived to me. So I do this with all of my books.

It's usually harder to figure out a starting point than you might think. I often have to revise my beginnings very heavily. This is no different from my other works; in the Mistborn books I've had to do this often. The prologue for [The Alloy of Law] was actually written to be the prologue to a sequel, and after I wrote it, I thought, "No, that needs to go in this book." We did a lot of shuffling around at the beginning of this book to find the right starting point.

No.

ELEANOR

Something I had always wondered...ah well. Who makes the mistcoats/mistcloaks, anyway?

Will we be seeing any more worlds from the cosmere?

There are other word-worlds you will see, there are several I haven’t visited yet at all. White Sand, the world of that book which was one of my earlier novels I never published. I intend to eventually do that series, it may not have the same title or anything but I do intend to do that series, there will be a sequel trilogy to Mistborn, eventually. I’m actually in the middle of working on a short story for that world right now to release online and there will be sequels to elantris but the sequels to elantris will deal with new characters they won’t they won’t, they’ll take place the second book will take place 10 years after the first book.

Sorry for the poor quality, but look what my wife got me today!

It was the hat. Put on a man's hat, surround your mind with his way of thinking, and it changed you. A man in dock worker's clothing passed by, shoulders slumped, whistling a sad tune. Wayne picked up the melody. Rough life, that was, working the docks. You had to commute each day on the canal boats—either that, or find a bed out near the waterfront, where you were about as likely to get stabbed as have breakfast. He'd lived that life as a youth. Had the scars to prove it, he did. But as a chap grew, he wanted more to his days than a fight on every corner and women who couldn't remember his name one day to the next.

So in the trilogy, we see that when someone has a Hemalurgic spike implanted in them, they can hear Ruin talking to them, both as a vision and in their head. However, we learn in the Hero of Ages that Ruin cannot hear a person's thoughts no matter how much under Ruin's influence they are.

In Alloy of Law, we see that Wax (and other Pathians) uses an earring to "pray" to Harmony, and we see that Harmony can hear his thoughts and respond.

So I guess this leads to three questions:

1. How does Harmony hear the thoughts of Wax, when it's explicitly pointed put that Ruin cannot?

2. Are the earrings that the Pathians use Hemalurgicly charged, as otherwise they would be of no use to Ruin, and therefore Harmony?

3. Or did Harmony completely change how that aspect of Hemalugy works?

How this all works dates back to the original design of the Magic system.

I wanted Ruin and Preservation to be complimentary opposites, like many things in the Mistborn world. Allomancy, for example, has Pushes and Pulls were are less "negate one another" opposites, but instead two sides to the same proverbial coin.

Ruin is invasive. The power is more "Yell" than "Listen." The philosopher would probably have some interesting things to say about the masculine symbolism of Hemalurgy and its spikes.

Ruin can insert thoughts. That power, however, can't HEAR the reactions. It's about invasion.

Preservation, however, is the opposite. Preservation listens, Preservation protects. (Perhaps to a fault—if there were no Ruin, there would be no change to the world, and life could not exist.) Because of this, Preservation can hear what is inside people's minds. It cannot, however, INSERT thoughts. (This is important to the plot of Hero of Ages.)

Harmony is both, the two complimentary opposites combined. And so, he inserts thoughts with Ruin and still uses Hemalurgy. He can also listen.

Yes, Wax's earring is Invested. (Or, in other terms, it's a Hemalurgic spike.)

Brandon Sanderson to Launch NW YA New Fantasy Series titled STEELHEART.

Thanks, all, for the good wishes on this.

I first started talking about Steelheart a number of years ago. (Five, maybe six?) It was one of the projects I'd been planning to do in 2007 when the Wheel of Time came along and kind of distracted me.

Unable to work on it for years, I instead did up a proposal and started shopping it in Hollywood. I got interest, but everyone said "We'd be more comfortable if the book were done." So, over the years, I slowly pieced together an outline in my spare time and did chapters when I could. (I think a reading I did of the prologue of this last year is floating around on-line somewhere.)

One of the problems with working on the Wheel of Time is that it's so time-consuming, I basically can't work on any other big project while writing it. I stay creative by changing to new ideas and new concepts whenever I start feeling burned out—I work on them for a short time, then get my groove back and turn to the larger project.

That's why you see all kinds of little projects popping out here and there from me. I can't do Stormlight 2 at the same time as WoT. Two big series are just too much to do at once; one would suffer. Yet, I still need artistic liberation now and then to try something new and refresh myself.

The two novellas I'm releasing this year (Legion, The Emperor's Soul) and the short Mistborn novel last year (Alloy of Law) are things that came out of these side deviations. Steelheart is another. Shouldn't affect Stormlight 2 very much. I always like to have one large project and a handful of smaller ones running at the same time.

It may seem like a lot to have on my plate, but if you add Alloy of Law, Steelheart, and the two novellas together they are combined around half the length of The Way of Kings. (And took about 1/10 the brain space...)

I don't want to make excuses for not doing Stormlight 2, but this might give a little insight as to why you keep seeing all of these other projects popping up.

corwin01

Are any of these stories within the cosmere?

Brandon Sanderson

The Emperor's Soul, a novella, is in the cosmere.

I also love how you evolved the world for The Alloy of Law. Despite it not being as "heavy" as some other stuff like Way of Kings and the trilogy, it was almost my favorite things you've written. I know it was supposed to be a "bridge" novel between trilogies, but is there any chance we'll see those characters again? Wax and Wayne are probably my favorite literary pairing since Tehol and Bugg or Arthur and Ford. :)

I am working on a sequel, as I was fond of the book too. It will be a side project, however, so I can't promise when it would be out.

What inspired you to take your Mistborn world into the realm of steampunk fantasy?

When I was originally working on the Mistborn trilogy, one of the things that interested me was taking this world and progressing it. Allomancy screamed to be used in a more advanced society where metal was a larger part of people’s lives. By ignoring that and setting it only in an epic fantasy world, I would miss out on the possibility for some really cool interactions. So as I was working on the first three books, I called my editor and said, "Hey, I’d really like to take this world after the trilogy and go forward with it."

I wasn’t planning to do anything steampunkish per se, but to move into a more modern world. But then I was between books of the Wheel of Time, and between books I often take a break and do something small. I started writing a short story set between the first two trilogies I planned in the Mistborn world, and that story expanded to become The Alloy of Law. I really enjoyed the concept and the characters in the story, so I kept going and it became a novel.

What is your favorite part of The Alloy of Law?

I would say my favorite part was getting to finally write about interactions between guns and Allomancy.

What was the hardest to write?

The most challenging part of that book was to keep a strong enough focus on the characters while writing a faster, shorter plot. That’s a balance I haven’t practiced nearly as much as I have with the epic fantasies, where I have basically as much time as I want with any given character. So that was a challenge.

What do you wish you’d done differently?

There’s not something I wish I had done differently, but I think the greatest weakness of the book is that for the ending to really work, you have to know some things about the original trilogy. For the rest of the book, you don’t need to know anything about the trilogy. So I wonder if that was the right move or not.

Did you learn anything from writing The Alloy of Law and what was it?

I learned that I can write a shorter novel. I'm certainly not as practiced at it, and there are things I need to get better at, but I've proved to myself that it's within my capacity to do.

Do you feel that each new book you release should be better than the last? Is that something you think about while writing, or do you just do the best job that you can and hope that your works improve naturally over time with your skill?

It really depends on the project. Yes, I want every book to improve, but that's a bit of a platitude. It's an easy thing to say. It gets a bit different when you sit down to think about it.

I followed The Way of Kings with The Alloy of Law. Is The Alloy of Law a better book than The Way of Kings? No, it is not. The Way of Kings I spent somewhere around ten years working on; with The Alloy of Law I had a couple of months. In the case of a book like that, I sit down and say, okay, there are things I want to learn in this process. Different books are going to have a different feel. Now, there are people out there who like The Alloy of Law better than The Way of Kings—it's not a better book, but there are people who will enjoy it more.

When I sat down to write Warbreaker, I said I wanted to get better at a certain type of humor. And I think I did get much better at that, in that book. Is the book itself better than The Hero of Ages that came before it? I do some things better, but it's hard to compare a standalone volume to the third book in an epic trilogy. They're going to do very different things.

So it's hard to say "better book"/"not better book." I think "always learning and growing" is a better way to put it than getting better with each book.

What would you like to share with readers about your works?

To the fans: I’m just delighted that you guys enjoy what I’m doing, and thank you all for supporting me. The response to my books in Australia has just been amazing. Deep thanks for reading and for sticking with me. I do a lot of weird things and I do that intentionally because I feel the fantasy genre has a lot of room left to grow and explore. I love what has come before, but it seems like during the 80s and 90s, fantasy really narrowed in on one major type of fantasy, at least the very popular fantasies.

I think we have a big explosion of possibility coming. George R.R. Martin has started that: he’s taken fantasy in a different direction, really blending some historical with some gritty realism and some epic fantasy all together; he does some really fascinating things. I think that is only one of the ways of approaching fantasy that lots of people are now doing in their books. I’m really excited about the fantasy genre.

Recently I was happy to write Mistborn, which is kind of a modernist take on fantasy where it was kind of a little bit self-aware. Now jumping ahead with Alloy of Law and doing fantasy: this is a fantasy book where the epic fantasy trilogy became the foundation for a more urban fantasy trilogy set with a more modern technology. I love doing that: I love seeing where I can take the genre, and people are sticking with me.

I appreciate that there was a time back in the 80s where if you put guns in your fantasy nobody read it. There was kind of a rule: no guns. It’s dangerous to do something different...Not dangerous, but it’s a little bit worrisome when you do this as an author. Will people follow you along rather than sticking to one series and doing it as one big massive epic? They have stuck with me, so I appreciate it.

Yes.

Phillip

Since you've had this other career—which has helped, I'm sure, in a lot of ways—what impact has this been on your original writing career, I mean I know you had to have slowed down your progress and your series, but you've still been writing those. What are the biggest impacts you've seen on your writing career because of taking on the Wheel of Time?

Brandon Sanderson

It's definitely done some...it's made me have to put down projects. In fact, next year, I have coming out the projects I was working on in 2007 when this came my way; The Rithmatist and Steelheart are both books that I did way back then that I didn't feel that I was able to release in the middle of the Wheel of Time books, even though I had them done, because I wouldn't have been able to do the revisions on them, and because I wouldn't be able to support them; I wouldn't be able to do sequels and things like that. They're both YA books. And that's, you know...when I accepted this, I said "Okay, I'm shelving these things." I did get to do a couple of books, I got to do The Way of Kings, which, granted, I already had a draft of that done. So really, the only book in these last years, the last five years that I've been doing this, that I've written from scratch and released was Alloy of Law. And so it's going to...it did kind of slow me down. The only reason it didn't slow me down as much as it could have was because I had all of this stuff done already. I had a great big backlog of books, because I enjoy writing, and I've been writing for years, and back then I wasn't as popular as I am now, so Tor would put things in slots later on, like...while I've been working on these, Warbreaker and Mistborn 3 came out, both of which were done years before I was offered the Wheel of Time. And so...yeah, all of this stuff that I had been working on long ago got delayed, and that was just fine—I went into this eyes open—but it is going to be nice to be able to go back to these things and give them some of the support that I've wanted all along.

You know, this project took more time than all of us expected it to. I had to say yes sight unseen to knowing how big it was. I knew what Jim had said, but I didn't know how much of it was done. I didn't know that we had two hundred pages out of two thousand. There was no way for me to know how much would need to be done. So yeah, it's been a big long deviation, but not a distraction, because I think my writing has grown by leaps and bounds. It's kind of like I had to go pump iron, because writing in the Wheel of Time has been much harder than writing on anything else I've done, and I have been forced to grow, and you can see my being forced to grow between the books in the Wheel of Time books. I think my writing is way better in Towers of Midnight than it was in The Gathering Storm, particularly in some of the ways that that Jim was strong. And so, I think that's helped me. It's certainly not an experience that I would trade for anything. I got to read the ending in 2007, so there's that. (laughter) But yeah, it's been a wonderful experience, but boy, it's been a big, big, big deviation. It's not where I thought my career would go at all.

Joe O'Hara

Was it daunting seeing just that small amount of work that was taken care of before you stepped on?

Brandon Sanderson

Well, it's daunting in two ways: First, I got that. It was really nice to have the ending. Like, having the prologue and the ending basically done—those were the two things that he did the most work on—meant that I had the bookends, which is how I build an outline anyway. I know where I start, I know my ending, and I build an outline out of that. But at the same time, there's three million words of notes about the series, which is daunting in another way. Yes, there's two hundred pages of work done on the book, and then there's this stack over here of all these other notes that include all of these things that are just mind-boggling, the stuff that's in there. We released a few of them last year for you guys. Was it last year that we released the notes?

Jennifer Liang

Yeah, we got the page on Cadsuane and...

Brandon Sanderson

Yeah, the page on Cadsuane and stuff like that. You just see all of weird things that he had in his notes. I have all the same sort of weird stuff in my notes about like Stormlight and stuff, but it's just fun to see. You go pore through these notes...he has the most random stuff. Lists of trees, lists of people, lists of this, and just millions and millions and words of this stuff, more than I can keep track of at all. It requires Maria and Alan to keep track of all this stuff. So it was also daunting in that, yes there are two hundred pages written, which actually nice, because as I've said before, if the book had been 80% of the way done, they wouldn't have needed to hire me, they wouldn't have needed to bring me in. When a book is 80% of the way done, that's when you get a ghostwriter, or Harriet just does it herself. She really could have done it in-house herself and finished that and said "Look, here we're going to do a few patches and stuff, but the book is mostly done."

And so, getting there and saying "Hey, I actually get to do something with this, I have an opportunity to add the scenes that I've been wanting as a fan for years and years, so I get a chance to actually write these characters, rather than coming in and just patching some holes," was very thrilling for me at the same time. You know, I worried that I would get there and it would just be patching holes—"Write these five scenes," or something like that—and that would have meant I wouldn't have really had a part in it. Granted, that would have been better, because it would have meant there was more Jim in it, and it would have made a better book, but at the same time, when I got to see those two hundred pages, I was saddened but excited at the same time.

Yes. I had this whole series that was outlined. This [Alloy of Law] was not in the outline, it was from fun, and I really enjoyed writing it, but it's not part of the series. It's three sets of three. And I may do other things like Alloy of Law, but Alloy was just for fun.

I don't know if you know this, but all my fantasy books are connected. There are repeating characters involved, but you have to search to find them. And the Mistborn Trilogy is kind of interconnected with that. Particularly with the third trilogy. The Science Fiction one.

No. This is foreshadowing the second trilogy. I may do some more books with these characters.

Question

So is the second trilogy in the same time period?

Brandon Sanderson

It will be a little future forward from this. More like mid–20th century.

I did, I did.

Question

K, good. I just wanted to make sure.

Brandon Sanderson

I feel kind of silly because it actually is a pun. And the entire Mistborn trilogy is therefore based on a pun. The first paragraph of the first chapter. But you know, if you can't tell from me naming my character Wax and Wayne, that I have a slight problem with puns.

Question

I love that! I didn't even realize it until I started to explain it to my family, and I was saying that the main characters are Wax and Wayne. It was a good moment.

Yes.

Question

Any estimate when the first book might be?

Brandon Sanderson

I might do some more Alloy of Law era things in between, they are not the second trilogy, but I will do them. The second trilogy will come between the break between the first sequence in the Stormlight Archive, and the second sequence of the Stormlight Archive. it's two five book sequences, and during that break I will stop and do the second Mistborn trilogy. So it will depend on how quickly I can write those.

Question

So when exactly would the second Mistborn trilogy take place relative to Alloy of Law?

Brandon Sanderson

Late 20th century era. Modern technology.

Zas

I've heard that's like... 50? years after Alloy of Law.

Brandon Sanderson

Yeah, right around there. Roughly. Not quite information age, is what I was looking at. So there's no direct equivalent, because the different technology aspects, but you would see it as something around the 80s. Maybe early 90s. Allomancer SWAT team is what it's about.

Question

Okay, that's exciting.

Brandon Sanderson

First book is a Mistborn serial killer versus an Allomancer SWAT team. With deeper ramifications to everything.

Question

Is Dan helping you with the psychology on that one?

Brandon Sanderson

Uh, I actually haven't yet gotten his help on a [profile?] yet.

No, I'm always looking for something that strikes me. And I'm looking for things that haven't been done before. Things that will make nice conflict, that walk the line between science and superstition.

Question

That's what I love, that it's all super scientific but it also has magic.

Brandon Sanderson

If you will Google Sanderson's First Law, and Sanderson's Second Law, I have two essays that I wrote about how I do magic. They're both on my website, but Google will find them easier than trying to find them on my website.

Question

Did you ever read Master of 5 magics?

Brandon Sanderson

I did. That's old school.

Question

Yeah, not great stories, but wonderful magic.

Brandon Sanderson

Yep. Great magic. That's what I felt about them too.

Question

When will the next Mistborn (Alloy of Law era) come out?

Brandon Sanderson

It will probably come out after the next Way of Kings. Next Way of Kings is next Christmas, the next Alloy of Law era book is probably the following Spring or something like that.

Question

Are you planning two more or three more?

Brandon Sanderson

I will do as many of those as strikes me. The Alloy of Law books are a deviation from the main world plotline.

Oh, that's a great question. The thing about Waxillian's name is, a lot of people don't like it. I actually love it, but that happens a lot in my books; I'll do something I love that I kind of know other people are going to be annoyed by. The Wax books came, actually....as I was designing the books, I was figuring the characters, and the pun Wax and Wayne struck me, and I thought, "I can't do that; that's too lame a pun." But the characters adopted those name before I could even do anything about it, and I actually tried changing the names, and it didn't work. You know how sometimes, organically, it just happens, and you're like, "I gotta go with this." And so I didn't want to actually just named them Wax and Wayne; I wanted Wax to be short for something, and it fits very well into the Mistborn universe, because all the characters tend to have nicknames that—you know, there was Clubs and Ham and Breeze in the last series—and I wanted a name that fit with that, and so Wax worked really well, but I wanted it to be short for something, and so I started looking at period names, things like William that worked and I actually ended up picking Waxillian because it also has a metallurgic sound and I figured names in this culture in the Mistborn world where metals are so important to the magic, you might have people named after metals; you might have names that sound like metals intentionally because of that resonance. At the end of the day I just really ended up liking it. It is a bizarre name.

Phillip Carroll

Thank you.

Thank you.

Question

...but I noticed towards the end you started creating overtones of a much larger story, and I was curious how you are going to follow up on that.

Brandon Sanderson

I will do more books without Alloy of Law, with Wax and Wayne. I originally—I may have said this in the forward to Alloy of Law—I pitched the Mistborn series a three-book, as three sets of trilogies, past-present-future, and I do still intend to do that, but I am going to pick up some of the things that I did in Alloy of Law and keep going with those same characters for a little longer, the main reason being I really like how Alloy of Law balances Stormlight Archive. I love big epics, but I also love fast-paced kind of actiony books as well, and being able to do a little bit of both of that fulfills both sort of itches, scratches them both, and so I like having Alloy-of-Law-style books come out alongside larger epics.

So I will be—to answer the questions that are coming—next is the last Wheel of Time book, and pretty much everything I have is devoted to that book. I'm hoping to have revisions of that done by the end of June, and then can start on Stormlight 2 which is what I will do next. The Wheel of Time book is coming out in January. I had really hoped to have it out in November, but it proved unrealistic, and I'm too optimistic on these things sometimes, and Harriet wisely counseled that we need to slow down a bit and spend some more time on the revisions, which we are doing. The Stormlight book, if I'm really on the ball, will be next November-ish—not this one but a year from that—and then I would follow it really closely with another Alloy of Law book.

I do plan to write a sequel to The Alloy of Law between books in the Stormlight series, and will probably write more of those after that. The second major Mistborn trilogy is something I will write after book five of the Stormlight Archive.

Szabó Dominik

If I'm not mistaken, you have great plans with this universe and you intend to write more trilogies set in this world. Would you tell us about this conception in some detail?

Brandon Sanderson

Sure. I originally pitched the Mistborn series to my editor as a sequence of three trilogies. Past, present, and future—epic fantasy, urban fantasy, and science fiction; all with the running thread of the magic system.

Since I just started coming out with the Stormlight Archive, I want to commit myself to that and don't want to dig into the second Mistborn trilogy for quite a while. Yet I want to prep people for the idea that Mistborn is going to be around for a while, and they are going to be seeing more books. I didn't want it to just come out of nowhere at them in ten years or whenever I get to it. So I decided to do some interim stories.

One of the things I'd been playing with was the idea of what happened between the epic fantasy and the urban fantasy trilogies. We have some very interesting things happening in the world, where you've got a cradle of mankind created (by design) to be very lush, very easy to live in, so a great big city could grow up there relatively quickly; civilization could build itself back up over the course of just a couple of generations. Yet there would be very little motivation to leave that area at first, which I felt would mean that you'd end up with this really great frontier boundary. The dichotomy between the two—the frontier and the quite advanced (all things considered) city in the cradle of humanity—was very interesting to me. So I started playing around with where things would lead.

To worldbuild the urban fantasy trilogy coming up, I need to know everything that happened in the intervening centuries. Some stories popped up in there that I knew would happen, that would be referenced in the second trilogy. So I thought, why don't I tell some of these stories, to cement them in my mind and to keep the series going.

I started writing The Alloy of Law not really knowing how long it would be—knowing the history and everything that happened, but not knowing how much of it I wanted to do in prose form. Things just clicked as they sometimes do, and I ended up turning it into a novel.

The light-hearted banter in your recent standalone Mistborn book, The Alloy of Law, is an unexpected yet delightful change from the more serious tone of the original trilogy. Why did you decide to make such an abrupt shift? Will we get to read more about Waxillium and Wayne?

This was quite conscious on my part. One of the reasons I ended up writing The Alloy of Law as I did is because I personally wanted something to balance The Stormlight Archive, which is going to be more serious and have a tone more like the original Mistborn trilogy. I'm planning a five-book sequence to start off The Stormlight Archive, so I wanted something to go between those books that was faster paced, a little more lighthearted, and more focused.

I love The Stormlight Archive—it's what I think will be the defining work of my career, but that said, sometimes you want a bag of potato chips instead of a steak. Sometimes you want to write that, and sometimes you want to read that. I knew not all readers would want to go along with me at the start on such a big, long series; they may want to wait until it's finished. So I wanted to be releasing smaller, more focused and more simply fun books in between, both for my own interest and for my readers. And I will keep doing this; there will be more Wax and Wayne books in the future, spaced among my bigger epics.

What can you tell us about this new Mistborn book?

When I originally pitched Mistborn I did it as more than one series. One of the things that fantasy does that I don't necessarily like is that an author will skip, like, 4000 years and come back and you're still in the same world, nothing has really changed. In The Wheel of Time, I like that steam technology is starting to appear; there's progress. I wanted to do a fantasy series where I told a story that had a classic, medieval feel, and then I wanted to jump forward several hundred years and tell an urban fantasy in a world with guns and skyscrapers and the same magic, and the story of the first series had become the mythology of the second. Then I wanted to tell a story in the future of that, a science fiction story where the magic had become a means of inter-stellar propulsion. So this book is along that continuum; it's not quite up to the second series.

It's a story that I wasn't supposed to be writing but I just loved. It's the era of industry in the Mistborn world. Now we have characters living post-gunpowder. Motor cars are beginning to appear, skyscrapers are just being built. I based some of it on 1910 New York. The protagonist is an old lawman from the equivalent of the Old West who moves back to the big city after 20 years outside. It's a whodunit-ish sort of thing. Imagine Sherlock Holmes in a fantasy world, if Clint Eastwood played the role. It's a little bit steampunk, but not true steampunk because I'm not going interesting places with the steam technology.

Another frequently asked question that I will get a bunch of times in line, so I will answer now: I am working on the second Stormlight book. (applause) Tor thinks it's coming out this fall; I'm hoping to meet their expectations. (laughter) If not, it will be the following spring. A sequel to Alloy of Law would be the next thing I would work on. (applause) Yeah, it's funny how these things happen. One of my favorite stories about Robert Jordan and the series is, you know...I started reading these books in 1990, right? How many people picked it up in 1990, when Great Hunt wasn't out yet? That's...the few the proud, right? 23 years?

Question

How many times did you reread it?

Brandon Sanderson

Yes, and you would reread it every time a new book would come out, right? That's what I did. Until you...at one point, I reread the whole series, and by the time I got done, the next new book was out, and I'm like, "Whoa, this takes a long time!" (laughter) And...there's a lot of questions I had as a fan that I have now been able to get answers to.

For instance, I went to Tom Doherty—Tom Doherty is the publisher at Tor; he started the company, and I don't know if you guys know, Harriet was the first person he hired, as editorial director; she was in charge of editorial, and Harriet edited a lot of wonderful books. One of the books she edited is Ender's Game, if you're familiar with that. (applause) And she did also discover Robert Jordan, and then she married him. (laughter) I've always noted that's a great way to make sure your editorial advice gets taken, right? (laughter)

And so I went to Tom, and I said, "Tom, really...how many books was it?" When you hear this talk of, "Oh, we expect it to be this long," "We expect it to be this long..." And Tom sat me down and said, "Okay, let me tell you Brandon. Robert Jordan came in, and he had this pitch for me, and he gave me this big, long description of this awesome book. He said in the first book...the first book ends with our hero taking a sword that's not a sword from a stone that's not a stone. That's where the first book ends. And from there, we have two more books; it's a trilogy." This is what Tom Doherty said, exactly. And then Tom said, "Jim,"—Robert Jordan's real name was Jim Rigney—"Jim, I know how you are. Why don't we sign you for six books?" (laughter) And Jim said, "Well, I don't need six books. This is a trilogy." And Tom said, "Well, if you think you don't need that, we can do something else. You know, let's just sign you for six books in the series." Tom looked me right in the eyes, and he said, "Brandon, I thought I was so smart." (laughter) "I thought I was buying that whole series for sure." And here we are on book fourteen.

And so, yeah; this has been quite the experience; quite the ride, quite the journey of 23 years, and it's been amazing to be part of it.

All right. And related to that, sometimes some little concepts kind of... cross worlds. When Miles [from The Alloy of Law] died, who was talking there? Him, or someone else?

Wow, that's a really excellent question. And I'm afraid I'm going to have to RAFO that.

Mason Wheeler

Aww... figures.

I also referenced the recent Q&A and this post, and speculated that the reason why the original poster thought Wax's sister was a duralumin ferring was because of Wax's comment that he did not feel any strong emotions as a result of her death. I told Brandon that the poster must have thought that she was deliberately suppressing her Connection with Wax by using Feruchemy.

I said that I didn't need a yes or no answer from him, and he replied that he would neither confirm nor deny my statement and would only agree that it was very interesting.

If you were to choose (to be) a Feruchemist or an Allomancer, which would you choose?

I would choose Allomancy, because I would want to have Steel Pushing; that's my favorite of the powers.

Question

Is that why you gave Waxillium Steel Pushing?

Brandon Sanderson

Yes.

Are there going to be any more Mistborn books?

Yes, there will. In 2014 there will be a sequel to Alloy of Law.

I'm really intrigued by both of those premises. Where do you keep getting all these ideas from? I really admire your ingenuity.

Also, and I'm not sure if you can/will answer this, but will we see another book with Waxillium Ladrian? His story doesn't appear to end with The Alloy of Law. And will his story be directly related to the next Mistborn trilogy? This has been eating away at me since finishing that book.

Wax's story was indeed directly related to the second trilogy, but I was intrigued enough with his time period that I find myself wanting to do more with him. I probably will.

Hey Brandon

I just want to start out by thanking you for writing such wonderful books, one read-through TWoK made you my favorite author. I cannot wait for Emperor's Soul so I can get some new cosmere information! As a 17th Sharder I have to ask at least two timeline questions.

When is Emperor's Soul set chronologically in relation to Elantris? Because if its around the same time Teod and Arelon might not have to stand alone against the Fjordell Empire.

My other question is also a timeline one. (There are a lot of those tonight haha) I heard you had to move TWoK a little bit due to some plot constraints. So does Warbreaker still fall around the same time as AoL or has that shifted as well?

I understand if you don't have time to answer these, I know authors are busy. Its great to see one such as yourself interacting with your fans. Thanks again for providing me with books that I've speculated for hours about!

Thanks for the kind words! Emperor's Soul is after Elantris, but not too long after. It is before Mistborn.

Second question is that I've moved things so that TWoK is around the same time as AoL, forced by some behind-the-scenes events. Warbreaker now happens before AoL.

What time period do they all fit in, do they all fit in time- at the same time?

No, like for instance, Way of Kings and Alloy of Law are pretty close to one another but Elantris is fairly far before them. So far I’ve written them chronologically basically, except I’ve skipped certain stories, like there’s a series called White Sand which is in the middle there somewhere which will actually be a jump back in time when I end up doing it and some things like that. And Dragonsteel is like way at the beginning which I’ll eventually do but I’ve done them chronologically so far.

Hi. So, you mentioned earlier that you have a tendency to write books you're not supposed to write, so you could kind of take a break.

Yes, uh huh.

Question

I assume a couple of those are like Alloy of Law and Legion.

Brandon Sanderson

Yes. Legion was one, yep.

Question

So, I really liked those books, but it seems kind of mean of you to leave so many unresolved plot threads. [laughter] Any chance we'll get anything there?

Brandon Sanderson

Yeah, Legion I actually wrote as a television show pitch, was the idea for it . . . pitch a series. And I immediately sold it to Lionsgate. And so, we'll see. It's always hard to say what will happen in Hollywood because there's so much moving there, and to get the pieces in place to make a show or a movie just takes so much work. But I'm hopeful that you will see more there. I am doing more with Alloy of Law. I'll explain that in a minute. Okay?

Question

Thank you.

Brandon Sanderson

Yep.

Would you ever expand on The Alloy of Law? I loved the ending, it made me want even more.

Speaking of Alloy of Law... To me it felt paced like a good movie. I feel like it would make a super fun movie. Just wanted to say that.

Keep being awesome!

Phantine

Ooh! I can answer this one. The sequel to Alloy of Law is called Shadows of Self. As far as I know, there hasn't been a date specified on when it'll come out since it's unwritten, but the best fan guess is sometime in 2014.

I agree on the movie thing. It's like Lethal Weapon with allomancers.

As the other person wrote, I will be doing more. Thanks for reading!

The initial plan for Mistborn was three trilogies, with Alloy of Law being a spin off. With Alloy getting a sequel, has the Waxillium portion become the second trilogy?

No. The second trilogy will still happen. (As will more Wax books.)

I love how many authors we get on this subreddit, it's amazing. Not sure if you meant this forum or not but it's still cool. I hope I see Brandon Sanderson one of these days, I have a stupid question for him.

Brandon Sanderson

Shoot.

I've been terrible about my reddit pms lately. Better to ask here.

Soronir

About Miles from Alloy of Law and his regenerative powers. If he was bisected down the middle and the halves were separated immediately before the healing process could begin, would the two halves each regrow into a whole Miles?

Good question. In all of the Cosmere's Shard-based magics, the greater portion of a bisected body regrows the lesser portion. If it were done EXACTLY halfway, the soul wold jump to one or the other randomly and that would regrow.

Amusingly, this first came up in 1999, six years before I got published. (I see someone else already mentioned the situation where I had to consider it.)

Halo6819

As little add—on Sanderson has stated that at its core, Shard-based healing is about restoring the person back to themselves. So someone who wears glasses and gets shot and healed, will still need glasses as that is how they (or their soul) sees themself. I assume this would happen in more extreme cases too, some one who had a limb amputated at birth gets healed at another time, the limb will not be restored because they see themself as an amputee, even if it is within the magic's ability to restore limbs to some one who recently lost one.

Phantine

So... wait a sec, the Lord Ruler got decapitated at one point...

What did he do with the severed head? Mount it on the wall?

Brandon Sanderson

:)

Phantine

He mounted it SIDEWAYS? :P

Phantine

Actually, this is kind of a sillier followup to a silly question, but could you use Forgery to say 'actually, this half had 51% instead of 49%' and temporarily clone Miles?

Brandon Sanderson

Boy. That's a can of worms, right there...

Sazed's two Shards do not "cancel out", as Brandon said that it would like being pulled by two huge gravitational tides. You can get to a way that you aren't instantly ripped apart, but that doesn't mean you don't feel it. EDIT: When asked what effect the Shards would have on Sazed, Brandon said, "Read Alloy of Law to find out".

When is the timeline for the sequel to Alloy of Law?

Sequel for Alloy of Law? Probably not next year but the year after. I’m pretty dominated by finishing the second Stormlight book right now. So once I do that, then things will open up a little bit more for what I might do. I do actually have half a sequel for Alloy of Law written but I don’t have time to finish it right now.

You snake. I just finished Hero of Ages, and come to find out I'll never know the last 2 metals. Grr.

Cadmium and Bendalloy are what you're looking for. They create bubbles of warped time around the Allomancer. I will be doing more books in the world, though not with the same characters, and you'll see the other metals.

mmm_burrito

Wow, I was just trying to josh with you man. Thanks for the info, though, I definitely look forward to more of your work.

Edit: I guess while I've got you, I'll tell you this: Mistborn was one of a very few books in the last few years to actually surprise me. Kelsier's arc completely came out of left field. I read a lot of fantasy. Enough that it's extremely rare for a book to really catch me off guard like that. For that, you have my thanks.

Brandon Sanderson

Thanks.

elbowfrenzy

I've heard you say that you were going to make more books set in the same world since I first started reading your books.

But my question is "when?"

I am dying to see what you have in store.

Brandon Sanderson

Well, it just so happens that I have a new Mistborn book coming out this fall. 300 years after the end of the last book, set in a roughly 1910ish tech level. Guns, trains, beginnings of the mass-use of electricity. And Allomancers. November this year.

Ah, that's a good question. And, um.. the wound would not be able to heal around the aluminum, but once the aluminum came out, and was gone from the system, they would be okay.

Kurkistan

Wait, is that a Bloodmaker, not a Thug?

Brandon Sanderson

Oh, you're talking about Thu— Oh, okay. Yeah, ummm... It would work similarly, but it really wouldn't really have a huge effect on them.

Kurkistan

Ah, okay. 'Cause Peter was implying that there was some weird aluminum interaction with Thugs.

Brandon Sanderson

What was he thinking of... There is some weird interaction but—

Kurkistan

< rudely interrrupts > In the wedding scene [in Alloy of Law] Wax thinks that they would have aluminum bullets to deal with Thugs and I was like "oh that's a typo" and Peter was like "oh no it's not..."

Brandon Sanderson

No no... That would just be—it's like I said: healing it until the bullet is gone. It's just the same as the Bloodmaker.

Kurkistan

< Various pleasantries from me apologizing for all the confusion >

1. What's the schedule on when Reckoners parts 2 and 3 be released?
2. What are your plans for the Mistborn universe? More specific, will there be a sequel to The Alloy of Law? Will there be Mistborn books taking place in a further future society, with respect to Alloy of Law?

1) Two is in January. Three hasn't been set yet. We'll see when I finish it.
2) Yes, there will be a sequel, probably next fall. And yes, we will eventually go further into the future.