Is there any sort of civilization on Braize?
Braize is the weirdest one because it's kind of like a prison. So, is there any civilization on Braize? Kind of. It's like a prison. That's all I'll say.
Was Adolin's murder of Sadeas him falling under the influence of Odium, or was that all him?
That was all Adolin.
Is there a separate "Shadesmar" for each planet or is it one big place that are all connected with different regions for each planet?
It's one big place with different sections.
So since its one big place, could spren travel to a different section that correlates with a different planet, such as the cognitive segment for Scadrial?
They could go there, but they wouldn't usually...
Is that because Honor's influence is only on Roshar?
*Brandon gave sort of a noncommittal half nod, but looked doubtful himself. Maybe best to interpret this last answer as a RAFO rather than reading into it too much.*
Is Roshar, or has Roshar always been the only large landmass on the planet?
Roshar is.... *Brandon then paused and looked up, thinking very hard* Roshar has always been the largest landmass--as long as there has been land.
Is there a reason why shadows go toward the light in Shadesmar, or is it just worldbuilding flavor?
There is a reason, but its not super important. It's like a cultural thing, things have reasons but they aren't always super relevant to the story.
Does Hoid have a Hemalurgically charged Nicrosil spike?
It's... unlikely. Hoid would not want to open himself to the influence of Shards so using Hemalurgy on himself is unlikely. Although Hemalurgy is the easiest way to get other powers, he'd more likely do things the hard way.
Will we see all of the Heralds doing things in the upcoming books?
The back five books are all about the Heralds. Two of them claim to be Heralds... Two of the point-of-views will be Heralds.
Does Harmony have any Splinters?
Do you mean like in his fingers? *Brandon has a coy smile. Questioner looks at him like "you know what I mean you fool". Brandon laughs.* No, he does not have Splinters right now. Good question.
Alright, but would nicrosil be the right metal to make a Hemalurgic spike if you did want to steal powers from another world?
It's a good theory, you're theorizing well.
On a similar note, since Elsecallers can physically go to Shadesmar and have access to Transportation surge, can all Elsecallers worldhop?
Yes, that is one of the Elsecaller powers.
In hindsight this seems like a really obvious question now *laugh*, but I think it's really interesting that Elsecallers can travel to other planets too--we didn't know that before.
There are hints in the names on the map of Shadesmar.
Any hint on how Nin got a hold of Nightblood, or how Vasher lost Nightblood?
Vasher and Nightblood had something of a falling out...
Could you write a clue about Shadesmar on my shirt?
Shadesmar has much investiture in some places.
There's a bunch of us on 17th Shard doing a role playing game set in the Reckoners universe, and we were wondering if there are any powerful Epics on the west coast that we should know about.
Night's Whisper is a super powerful Epic on the west coast, and Obliteration could definitely be there for Oregon's destruction.
Crem and the Purelake on Roshar. Do they have any connection to Cultivation?
Both existed on the planet before Cultivation arrived.
But both are influenced by her now?
Yes, she influences both.
There's that trick with Feruchemy that lets you make metalminds that others can tap. Could you do something similar with Self-Awakening?
Oh yeah, there are all sorts of tricks that you can do. You could use other peoples Breaths, make it seem like you don't have any Breath-
Awaken an object so that others could access its Breaths?
Yes.
We know that Hoid has a bead of lerasium. Does he have any atium?
He has access to atium, yes.
Did any atium survive The Hero of Ages?
Yes.
Did any kandra survive the end of Hero of Ages?
Yes.
Are there any kandra on Roshar?
Yes.
Is Axies one of them?
No, but good guess. The Aimians are a different race.
What does Investiture look like in the Spiritual Realm?
Er, I haven't said anything about that yet.
But is it important?
Yes, it's important.
Could you say that it looks anything like mist?
Well you could say that it looks anything like mist. *smiles teasingly*
Do Axies's and Jasnah's reversed shadows have a common source?
Yes.
Does it have anything to do with its draw towards Investiture?
*After a pause* It has more to do with Shadesmar than Investiture.
I asked another question about the population levels of Mistings, Ferrings, and Twinborn.
The numbers in the [Alloy of Law Mistborn Adventure Game] supplement are off. (It states the occurrence of Mistings/Ferrings is 1 in 50 people.) He said that they're not terrible, but they definitely are shown as somewhat more common than they really are. But he also said that they're not nearly as rare as people seem to think; for example, he stated that virtually everyone would know at least one Coinshot. So there are definitely a lot of Allomancers around.
And the occurrence of Twinborn would not be a normal statistical spread (alas). As folks opined before in this thread, the Terris folk do tend to keep somewhat to themselves, so there's not a huge amount of population mix. So Twinborn will be rarer.
I did point out that there had to be some mix, else we'd be seeing full Feruchemists around, and to that he mostly just smiled and looked mysterious. As he does.
I asked Brandon if Sazed will resurrect Kelsier at some point in the future, since Brandon has pointed out that Kelsier's soul has stuck around and is still tied to Scadrial.
His response was "Sazed is not going to resurrect Kelsier. Keep your eyes open." And there was a verbal emphasis on Sazed's name.
Someone asked how much Sazed "cheated" when it came to the Metalborn distribution.
That was met by more mysterious smiles and even a bit of chuckling.
What's the approximate ratio of Epics to "normals?" Is that number increasing, decreasing, or staying roughly the same?
The ratio of Epics to normal folks is about 1 in 10,000. Brandon then clarified, without prompting, that was pre-Calamity population and the ratio is much higher now because so many normal people died. He then gave an example of Newcago, which has about 1000 Epics in a population of 250,000, so in that particular case the ratio is 1:250.
Will we ever see full Mistborn and/or Feruchemists again?
Yes, but they may be cobbled together...
I meant more along the lines of a natural born Mistborn.
RAFO
*Following a reading* That's called Adamant, and the premise that made me want to start writing it was this idea of basically Silence of the Lambs in Space.
Right after this humankind is going to be betrayed by the "nice" aliens, who have given them this sidejack technology and helped them in their war against the violent Knockers. And it turns out they've been played the whole time, the "nice" aliens just wanted a nice race of obedient soldiers. They turn off the sidejack, it knocks out the entire command staff of the Armada and that leaves Jeff, who doesn't have one, who's not really a commander, in charge. He's able to grab the flagship and fly away with the Centurion in the brig, who is the greatest military mind that the galaxy has ever known. So what follows is the story of him trying to get the Centurion to give him advice on tactics in the war against the quote-unquote nice aliens while the Centurion is trying to figure out how to escape and get away from him.
It's a very fun story, but it's not ready to be released. One of the things I'm thinking of doing is if I can maybe slide this into the Cosmere, I haven't decided yet. It would be really fun to get it in there, I think it could, I would just have to lose the Shakespeare line. That's kind of hurting me because I like that line. So we'll see if I can get it in or not...
Is it part of a series?
What I'm going to do is I'll probably do four or five novellas that build-- So it's like a novel told in novella form. I kind of imagine doing some episodes quote-unquote, right? And then have a six-episode season with the last episode being the end, so a mini-series basically. Kind of like what was done with… Wool, that's what it was… I think the the serial has a chance of coming back because of ebooks and things like that.
In Sixth of the Dusk, the advanced society that's trying to take advantage, have we seen them before?
They've been referenced elsewhere
Sophie, the robot that Melhi made to mess with Kai, is Melhi: she made a robot duplicate of herself. Brandon said that she actually feels kind of bad about all of it now...but that she's also rather messed up.
It is my pleasure, it has been an honor. For those who couldn't hear it was a thank you for releasing books somewhat faster and a thank you for finishing The Wheel of Time.
You know, I've been there. I picked up The Wheel of Time in 1990, my 8th grade year was '89, [...] yeah it's funny, I talk about The Wheel of Time. Everything I picked up while I was coming to love fantasy was all completed series or series in the middle of being written, and so as a kid I'm like "These are all famous series, I want to find one that isn't, what's going to be mine?" You want to be discovering, so I'd go to the bookstore every week to look at the new books coming out and try to find them and I remember grabbing Eye of the World, the first Robert Jordan book, and being like "Oh, this is a big book". I was a kid with not much money, so if you bought a big book it wasn't that much more expensive than a little book but you got a lot more reading in it. It was a good bang for your buck so to speak. So I bought that book and I loved it, and I thought "Oh this is going to be it, this is--" And I remember when the second book came out and they had trade paperbacks and my little bookstore didn't get a lot of those and I went "Oh, OH, something's happening" and then the third book was there in hardcover and I said "Ah-HA! I was right!" So I had this sort of pseudo-paternal instinct for Wheel of Time even when I was 17.
But then I do know what it's like to wait, and you know George [R.R. Martin] is a guest here [at ConQuest 46], I want to speak toward the fact that he has had a long career and given people a lot of books, he may be slowing down a little bit as he's getting older, we all do. And he just wants to make sure his books are all right. I get tired hearing people-- Because I heard people do the same thing to Robert Jordan, y'know cut George some slack. He spent years and years toiling in obscurity until he finally made it big. I'm glad he's enjoying his life a little bit and not stressing about making sure-- You know getting a book that size out every year is really hard on writers. Robert Jordan couldn't keep it up, nobody can keep it up. Stormlight Archive's every two years. Even I, being one of the more fast writers out there, I'm not going to be able to do one of these things every year, there's just too much going on in one. So thank you, I will try to get them to you very consistently but it's going to be about every other year.
Another thing to know about George is George cannot write outside his particular environment-- All writers have their craft and I'll ask [Brandon] about it in a second, but George with HBO sending him out to promote, and cons, he's not writing. Whereas Brandon wrote in his hotel room I heard.
On both nights.
And I often do that too. George can't do that, so that's a difficulty too. There are other factors involved. And people love to meet him but when you meet an author sometimes they're not even writing 'cause they can't keep focus. So let's talk about-- How fast do you write a novel...
My writing approach and how fast I write. I'm actually not a particularly fast writer, for those of you who are writers out there I'll go at about 500 words per hour. What I am is a consistent writer. I enjoy doing this and my average day at home will be I get up at noon, because I'm a writer not a-- I'm not working a desk job, I don't have a desk, I don't go to a desk, I go and sit in an easy chair with my laptop, and I work from about 1 until 5. And then 5 until 9 is family time, I'll go take a shower, play with my kids, eat dinner, spend time with my wife, maybe go see a movie, whatever we end up doing. By about 9 or 10 she goes to bed and I go back to work and then I work from about 10 until 2-4 depending on how busy I am. If I'm ahead on schedules and things at 2 I'll stop and play a videogame or something, that's goof off time, go to bed about 4. And it really just depends on what's going on. If I'm traveling a lot, that puts a lot of stress on the deadline, and I've been traveling a lot lately, so in those cases I try to get some work done while I'm on the road, and it usually is not nearly as effective. I'll get a thousand words out of 4 hours I can sneak out of the day to get writing done. When you're breaking that rhythm, artists are creatures of habit and that rhythm-- Sometimes shaking things up is really good for you, but if that shake up is also kind of tiring, tiring in a good way I like interacting with people and going to cons, but you get back up there I feel like I worked all day and now I have to work all day. It can be rough, and at the same time with the schedule I want to have which is my goal is to release one small book and one big book a year. That’s my goal. One adult book and one teen book, and sometimes those schedules get off so you get one one year and three the next year. Or sometimes I do things like write two books instead of one, I did that this year, or last year. I wrote two Alloy of Law era Mistborn books, the second era of Mistborn books, and together they are half the length of a Stormlight book. So sometimes you'll see three. But I want to be releasing consistently, I want to have a book for teens and a book for larger people who are teens at heart? I dunno. It's hard because you don't want to put a definition on them, I don't want people to go "Oh The Reckoners is for teenagers therefore I don't want to read that" and I don't want to discourage, I've had 7-year-olds come up with their copy of The Way of Kings--
They're strong.
Yeah they're strong. My 7-year-old can barely read the Pokemon video game, so-- we played that-- and so I don't want to discourage anybody from picking up a book they think they are going to love, but I do want to be releasing one quote-unquote teen book and one quote-unquote adult book. By the way, since I've started writing teen, I started distinguishing them and it's really hard to say "I write teenage novels and adult fantasy." *laughter* That term does not always evoke the right image I want… I've been introduced sometimes at conventions that are outside my circuit, writing conferences, as the fantasy guy. They say "Here's our fantasy man" *Brandon makes a shocked/confused face prompting laughter* Okay I can take that.
The question is: Shallan from The Stormlight Archive being an illustrator herself, an artist, gave me an interesting opportunity to show the world through sketches and illustrations, is that something I thought about ahead of time?
In fact that was one of my big goals with The Stormlight Archive, I wanted to-- So I have this feeling on epic fantasy, one of the cool things about it is this sense of immersion, and then the epic fantasies that I have loved the most, things like Dune, if you count that as fantasy it's one of those hybrids, or The Wheel of Time, what they do is they really make this world real to you and that helps these characters, you know I will say that characters are most important but if characters are caring about things you think are silly or interacting in a world you think is not real, you aren't going to believe those characters. And so for me I am always looking for how I can enhance that sense of immersion, and how can I do that without burdening the reader with huge long paragraphs of descriptions of the world around them. And very early in the process of doing The Stormlight Archive I decided I wanted to base a character on Pliny the Elder, which is one of the early scholars in Western thought who did all these sketches and writings-- Back in those days a scientist was everything, right? Darwin did sketches and things like this. You are going to be drawing and writing and approaching all of the sciences and arts as one. Instead of being a person who makes food or stabs other people you are going to do all the other stuff. And that was a really interesting character for me because I was able to develop this idea of "We are going to put sketches in the books". Now The Stormlight Archive, one of the rules with myself is that these all, all the art and there's some thirty pieces of art plus in each book, all have to be in-world artifacts. That's the sense of immersion, right? I don't think we've lost it but it's become a cliche that every fantasy novel has a map in front of it. And that stretches back to Tolkien, but Tolkien's map was the map they used in the book to travel, right? It's the actual map. And I like that, it says "Here's this artifact from the world" rather than "Here is an illustrator from our world giving you this extra information". And so I've taken great pains to say what kind of art they would have, how can I get this into the books, why is it relevant, and how does it help? I found that this helps, particularly with Shallan being a natural historian, sketching out creatures that I don't have to maybe spend quite as long describing-- I still have to because a lot of people listen to the audiobook and I still want them to get the picture, but it just helps cement those things. Anyway, that was one of my big excitements about the world for years and years and it's one of the things propelling me to write it.
So the question is: I use a lot of religion in my books how do I balance that with my own personal beliefs?
So, I'm a religious person and what this has done to me in specific is make me really interested in how religion affects people or how the lack of religion affects people. I find that the real fun of reading and writing, raising interesting questions, and approaching a topic from lots of different directions, is a thing that is really fascinating to me. I ascribe to a school of thought that I kind of-- this is a little unfair to these gentlemen but I kind of divide it among the Tolkien and C.S. Lewis line of those two were famously in a writing group together, and if you don't know Tolkien actually converted C.S. Lewis to Christianity, which is very interesting, and they were both deeply religious people, and they approached it very differently in their fiction. C.S. Lewis felt that fiction should be didactic and teach you a lesson and Tolkien repeatedly refused to tell people what he thought the themes in his books were. When they would come up to him and say "It's a metaphor for World War II, isn't it?" he would say "No, it's a story." And I am more a Tolkien than a C.S. Lewis. Â I like with fiction-- I consider myself a storyteller primarily, and I hope that a good story is going to raise interesting questions but that has to be focused around what the characters are passionate about and what they are thinking about. And so I try to populate my books with people who are asking interesting questions from a variety of different perspectives.
I said on a panel I was on yesterday "Nothing bothers me more than when reading a book where someone has my perspective, there's only one person, and they're the idiot. Whatever it is that they are an idiot about that I agree with."Â And I'm like ahh can't you at least present my side-- I want everyone who reads my books, regardless of their religious affiliation, if they see something like their own belief system in there I want them to say "Yes, he's presenting it correctly." And part of that means that I have to approach my fiction in certain ways, for instance, I like fiction that is ambiguous to the nature of deity, if there is one. I want-- If you can create a book with really cool atheist characters and then go "By the way here's this all powerful, all knowing benevolent god that he's just refusing to acknowledge" that undermines that character completely. And so I create my fiction so that the different people on the sides of the argument, just like in our world, have good arguments on both sides. And I think that if you present characters with interesting choices, making interesting decisions you will-- truth will rise to the top. That's kind of one of the purposes of fiction, is to discuss these issues. So that's kind of a roundabout answer to your question, that as a person of faith how I approach writing my books. I'm not sure if it's the right answer, but it's the answer I've been giving lately.
I had a teacher, when I was in 8th grade--this is true, her name was Ms. Reeder *laughter* yes, she's now a professor in California-- and I was what we call in the industry a reluctant reader, that is a fancy term for "me no like-y books" and she couldn't get me to read. I was one of these boys-- it happens to a lot, more boys than girls, but it happens to a lot of kids between about 5th and 7th grade, they fall out of reading. And for me I suddenly found books boring during that era. I joke about it in one of my books actually, these books with the awards on the cover with the boy who has a pet dog and then the dog dies and that's your story. And I thought these were boring. I did try Tolkien, but if you're not a good reader trying The Lord of the Rings, I bounced off that so hard, had no idea what's going on. I got to like the barrow-wights scene, like "Euhhh what's going on? This is boring..."
That was a few years before my 8th grade year where my teacher, she realized I was struggling.  And she realized that I was faking my way through book reports.  And so she called me up after class and she said "The next book report is going to be a book that I have read and then you are going to read and we are going to talk about it." So she took me to the back of the room and teachers have these racks of ratty paperbacks… it's like a hundred kids have read these books, they're stained with school lunch spaghetti sauce and things like that. But these were some of her favorite books that she loaned out to students, and I browsed through those and I found a book called Dragonsbane, Barbara Hambly. Nowadays kind of a lesser known classic of the genre, it's fantastic, I love it. It has this gorgeous Michael Whelan cover on it. And it was longer than books I had tried before but it also looked more interesting. So I dove into that book, and you know the weird thing about this book is that it should not have worked, right? If you've read Dragonsbane it's about a middle-aged woman who has been told that if she would just dedicate herself to her magic-craft she could be one of the greatest practitioners ever. Her teacher keeps saying to her "Look you just need to dedicate yourself more". And at the same time she has a family, several children and a husband who in the book is called to go and slay a dragon. He's like in his fifties now, he killed one once when he was twenty, he's the only living dragonslayer and the story is sort of about him going "Oh I've got to go and kill this dragon" and her saying "Uh… You're in your fifties, you're going to get killed." It's a really interesting story, told through this woman's eyes and it's basically a middle-aged woman having a mid-life crisis, having to choose between her career and her family. Not normally what you would give to a 14-year-old boy and expect him to absolutely love it. But this is the power of fantasy, it's why I love the genre, it's why I came to love it.
It's the answer to your question, because I feel that in fantasy and science fiction we can blend the sense of the fantastic with the sense of the familiar and we can learn about people around us while having an awesome story at the same time. I remember a few years ago there were books that would come out, it was for parents to fool their kids into eating vegetables, they would say "You can mix this vegetable with this food and they won't taste it". I kind of view fantasy a little like that. You can have this awesome adventure that's really fun and exciting and at the same time you can deal with lots of interesting real-world issues but not be pretentious.  You know there are a lot of great books in a lot of genres, but I'll read some that are "realistic" fiction and they just hit you with this moral so much that you are sick of it after the third chapter. Whatever the reason-- I know what the reason is that this book connected with me. My mother graduated first of her class in accounting in a year where she was the only woman in the accounting department. After doing that she had received a scholarship to go get a CPA and she had made the decision that "You know what I'm pregnant, I'm going to stay home with my son while he's a little kid until he goes back to school and then I'll go back to a job." And as a kid, you know, when I heard this story as a teenager I was "Well of course she did, it's me". Right? When you're a teen everything is about you, "Well obviously that's the right decision". In reading this book and seeing where it wasn't accounting it was magic I was like "Woooh that's how my mom feels about accounting and she gave that up, it's not an easy decision, it's not the obvious decision. Both decisions are right, she just picked one of the two and she did it for me". And so I get out of this book, this goofy fantasy novel about killing a dragon, and I understand my mother better. And that blew my mind as a kid. I ran back to my teacher, "there have to be more books like this" and so she took me to the library, which I had not spent much time in, and I just went to the card catalogue… the cards in a line, you read them by title and the next book in line was Dragon Prince by Melanie Rawn so I got into those books, and then the next book after that in line was Dragonflight by Anne McCaffrey. That was my introduction to fantasy. I spent the next months reading every Anne McCaffrey, Barbara Hambly, and Melanie Rawn book I could get my hands on, to the point that when someone handed me David Eddings that summer I said "I don't think guys can write this genre." *laughter* I was really skeptical. That was my mentorship, those three ladies.
Do you mind if I ask one more Wheel of Time question? After A Memory of Light, Mat did he lose his luck, is he still ta'veren at all?
My perspective--now, I'm not speaking from a perspective of knowledge because Robert Jordan does not say in the notes, at least not that I saw. Speaking as Brandon the...very enfranchised fan and extra knowledgeable fan, but not as author of the series, I think he kept his luck but lost a portion of it. Meaning the luck is inherent to him, from the fact that the Heroes of the Horn know him as the Gambler. Luck and gambling are associated with him through all of his past lives, and I think that he naturally has some of that. When he was ta'veren it amplified and manifested, but he would still have it.
I was curious about that.
And I don't even know if he's not ta'veren anymore.
I remember in one of the books they said that they weren't always ta'veren for their whole life.
I think he expects that he's not anymore, but of the three he's the one that's still the center of global politics at the end of the books. If any of them was going to remain ta'veren, it would be him.
I've been trying to avoid Wheel of Time questions, but I've got one. We need to settle the score... who understood women better: Mat, Perrin, or Rand?
Oh wow, who understood women better? So I'll say this: Perrin understood his woman better than Mat or Rand understood the women that they were interacting with. Does that make sense?
It does.
I'm going to go with Perrin. Although by the end of the book Rand has recalled his past...no, Lews Therin was terrible with women, so I don't know. I'm still going to vote Perrin.
That's not just because he's your favorite?
No, I'm going to say it's because he understands human nature the best, despite having this whole wolf side. Or maybe it's because of this whole wolf side that he's able to look from an exterior perspective at the way humans are doing the things they are doing, and relating it.
The graphic novel we are working on right now is White Sand, which is one of my early unpublished novels. We felt we could adapt that to take the poorly written stuff out and leave the awesome stuff.
Do you have any updates for the progress of that?
Yeah, it's going really well. We just got a sample of the cover art for the first volume. I think they are collecting 6 chapters in a book, and there will be 18 chapters total. So three volumes, and I think we are almost done with the first six. One of the things that I told them is that I really want to be far along in this project before we release anything. Because The Wheel of Time fans got burned on their comic.
I think that there have been enough instances of things like that, so I want to be able to produce something complete and say, "Look, we've got this much of it done and this much more to do. We've at least got the first 6 chapters, a complete book you can read."
Or it's like, we've got all this and it's only six months to the last one, it's not 2, 3, maybe 4 years.
The Reckoners, it's got a lot of a comic book feel with superheroes. Are there any plans at all for that to be adapted to graphic novel or anything?
Not right now. The graphic novel rights would be owned by the people doing the movie, and if they ever get the movie off the ground then I would say they probably will do a graphic novel. I toyed with graphic novels for many years when I had the original idea for it, but the fun of Steelheart was me trying to take comic book tropes and do them in the novel form. You've seen how movies have taken comic book tropes and turned them into films, and I really have enjoyed that. But they do very different things; it's like its own new genre, the comic book film.
I wanted to do the same thing for books, thinking, what are the strengths for a prose narrative as opposed to a more visual storytelling method?
It's just one of those novels that when you're reading it, it seems like it could be easily adapted and it would suit either.
And do you have to do a lot of research for the magic systems or is most of it just imagination?
It really depends on the magic. For instance with some of them I need to work out the physics. For Mistborn, I often have to go my assistant and say, "Peter, go do the math." I used to have to look at the math myself and things like that. Mistborn magic is very science-derived, so looking at the math is essential.
How much time do you spend during the initial planning stages of writing your novel, developing your magic systems and going through the laws and such?
It really depends on the book. For Steelheart, I didn't need very much. On that I'm using a superhero-themed story, and all I really needed to know was: How did people start getting their powers? How are their weaknesses developed? How are these things interrelated? From there I can just look at each power set and say, "Okay, this person has this power set."
You don't have to extrapolate quite as far with superheroes. At the same time, they are very limited magics that only work within a certain small realm, so the reason you don't have to do as much extrapolation is because there isn't as much to do. In that case, it was the matter of a week.
With something like The Stormlight Archive, it was a matter of months or years of working on the magic systems. It really varies.
And just touching on this again, do you have any tentative dates for the sequel to Elantris?
I really don't. I was wanting to try and do it for this year, but the fact that I have Stormlight on my plate means that I won't. The time to have been able to do that would have been last year, but I wrote the new Wax and Wayne novels instead. It is going to happen, in the timeline of the Cosmere it needs to have happened by the time that I am doing Mistborn Era 3; the 1980s-level-technology trilogy. We need to be caught up on where Elantris is, so that the whole Cosmere timeline can happen. So it will happen, but I know it won't be for at least another few years.
Do you watch Doctor Who? And if so, would you like to write an episode?
I have watched some Doctor Who and liked it a lot--but I don't do screenplays, so I might not be a good choice.
When you write.do you see the characters as real people or cartoons or comics?
Real people.
Will there be a sequel to the secret project? (are we allowed to use it's name yet?)
Yes, you can use the name now. And yes, I plan a sequence of these.
Where did the Cosmere come from? What inspired you?
Lots of things. Isaac Asimov connecting his Robot books and Foundation books was a partial inspiration to be certain.
Parshendi/Parshmen/Gemhearts vs ISIS/Non-radical Muslims/Oil - A comparison you've considered while writing?
The Parshendi aren't the radicals, though. In that conflict, I'd argue that the humans are.
With the White Sand graphic novels, do you intend to continue the sequence past the first MS of White Sand?
Yes, if they are popular enough, I do.
If a large group of Windrunners lashed enough mass towards a single point, could they create a black hole?
Offhand, I think that would be theoretically possible, though in practicality impossible. We'd need [Peter Ahlstrom] to do some math.
Regarding the Ire: did they set out into the Cosmere pre- or post-Reod?
RAFO! :)
Can you tell us the name of factory from which Tia gets her Cola pouches? And perhaps the city?
Factory is one that doesn't exist in our world, but I believe I have it in Chattanooga.
How hard was it for you to get your first manuscript published? Did you send multiple copies?
It took me ten years of work to become an author who wrote books that were of professional quality.
Once I hit that point, my chances improved. Elantris was rejected half a dozen times over four years before selling.
