Rhythm of War Release Event

the various bookstores that you all got your books from and the other part will be readings we're actually going to do an extra healthy dose of readings today for reasons i'll explain in a few minutes but first off i generally start release parties by letting a room of five to ten thousand people applaud for my team um however today all we have here is my team but i'm going to still give them uh some thanks for so that you guys know that this doesn't just come from me uh we'll start with adam who has put together this release party and is yes i have uh he's probably been through about 20 monsters as drinks as he has stressed out about this it's his first time kind of running a release party so thank you adam uh he's my my in-house publicist and also uh cara did quite a bit putting this together and uh making sure everyone got their books so thank you to kara and to her team which includes mem and lex and michael and a bunch of minions um you can clap for them too so watching at home are peter my editorial director and karen our continuity editor so hello peter and karen thank you guys so much and sitting over the corner who will be speaking to you a little bit later in the middle of the presentation to give me a break is isaac isaac stewart our art director he worked with a very talented team of artists including ben mcsweeney who's probably watching remotely at the moment and various other painters who he'll do a lot of introductions to them i know we have one here with us today one of our special friends um but that is howard and er that is isaac and emily my wife let's applaud for her she's the business manager at dragon still entertainment she has all the things that would i would probably have to do if she weren't here and instead i can just write books so anything that has to do with taxes or payroll or all of the really annoying stuff of owning a business she has to do and i get to stand in front of people and be applauded and then spend the rest of my time telling stories about wizards so thank you very much to emily and to my family did i forget yeah did i forget anybody once i think i forgot peter and that uh that was not good so i think we got to everybody um oh i suppose we can applaud for kathy should we applaud for kathy maybe should applaud for kathy kathy adam's rival is also emily's assistant part-time bird wrangler a part-time child wrangler and doing various odd jobs for us including working in the warehouse so um there is a lot of work that comes that goes into creating particularly stormlight books we have had kind of a frantic year now i know everyone's had a frantic and strange year um we had the uh extra stress of trying to get a stormlight book together on time uh while all this was happening in some ways that was good because it meant that i was home uh rather than traveling the world but in other ways it was just one more stressor so i'm really pleased uh and you guys should make sure if you have the opportunity to ever talk to one of them or interact with them online thank my team because they pushed extra hard to make this happen we noticed lots of movies getting delayed and lots of video games being delayed and we thought when the time comes for the book to come out our fans are really going to need this and so we did what we could and despite dodging a few bullets we have had it come out on time so i am very pleased to present to you rhythm of war [Music] um okay was it embedded on the website is that what was happening um and so yeah well uh we probably should have expected that so the lexus is just sending it to the stores and the stores right well then we will give them a few minutes to propagate that and in the meantime i am going to take a delaying random question um so can you bring us up a question isabel just pick one and bring it over and we were going to do the q and a's later on but might as well have me talk about something while we're making sure that everything is getting propagated and things like that um and so all right bring it on up so everyone can see it this is isabel our uh wonderful assistant um and part-time mini minion uh what is my favorite dinosaur um my favorite dinosaur is magellan the macaw which is cheating i suppose so if i had to pick an actual favorite dinosaur i don't know uh this is one of these things that when you have children it starts to during their young lives be very important to them that everyone has a favorite everything i don't know if that's been same experience with those of you that have children as it was as was was with us but i've never had you know really given much thought at least not in 40 years or whatever to my favorite color but as soon as my kids could figure out that picking a favorite color distinguished one from another then i had to have a favorite color that was different from the favorite color of each of the children because we couldn't have the same favorite colors and the same thing has gone on with favorite animals and favorite foods but i did not end up ever getting asked to pick a favorite dinosaur i don't think my kids ever really got into dinosaurs to the extent that some others have been so i would have to say uh no idea what my favorite dinosaur is unless dragons count right um which they probably don't so how are we looking there adam we've been giving them some time um is our websites uh have any chance of going back up right now we're several thousand short huh um yeah uh well we will figure this out for future times i just assumed we were sending them the youtube link also um rather than just the page link but they we didn't know what that was until until just today that's right so well let's do one more question give people a little bit more time uh what is my favorite art on imagine the gathering card uh that one i can answer because i have a lot of favorite magic the gathering card stuff a lot of the things that i will pick as my favorite will hearken back to my youth right if i'm picking a favorite book it's often one of the favorite books that i read when i was young that got me into fantasy and in this case my favorite magic card art is from vesuvan doppelganger which was my favorite card when i was first really getting into magic for those who haven't played the game the souven doppelganger is a tricky card that copies someone else's thing um and my brother when he first got the magic to gathering he came back with a pack that had had this giant monster in it that was super cool it was huge uh it took a lot of resources to summon it was very big and damaging and scary and cool looking and so i went and bought a pack and i came back with a little um my rare card was a little assassin it was a royal assassin and i thought he gets this big awesome cool card and i get this little derpy thing but then the moment my assassin killed his big awesome thing um and he had spent a ton of resources getting it out and i'd spend a little bit on mine and then just tapped it to kill this thing i realized this game is trixie um and so and immediately the mere player was born i started doing all sorts of black and blue which are the tricky colors that will do all sorts of things like you summoned a big monster i've got a copy and then i kill your big monster and only i have one now um and i spent way less getting mine than yours and so that is the sort of thing i played a ton when i was younger and is kind of the um the way i still enjoy playing magic the gathering how we looking now adam have we gained any people 2 500 i mean about 2 000 now okay out of how many do we have 10 000 pop possible 6800 all right so um i think i will just continue on into the speech part thank you isabel this is the part where i kind of blab at you for a little while and um i do this with all of my release parties i come up with some sort of thing i'm thinking about or whatnot this time is going to be a little different from other times uh because the thing i was thinking about led very easily into something i haven't done before at one of these release parties but i thought would be very fun um the thing i've been thinking about this time is in relation as they often are into a question i get asked quite a bit and in this case the question that i get asked quite a bit is if you could go back in time and change one thing about when you were breaking in when you were trying to become an author if you could change one thing about that what would it be and why and i usually answer this question by saying i would change nothing because i have read that book and i know what happens if you go back in time and meddle with the timeline either you end up actually killing your own grandparents becoming your own grandparents or you step on a butterfly and america turns communist right these are like the only three good outcomes those are the good ones and so no i wouldn't mess with the timeline but um that's usually when i'm being tongue-in-cheek if i actually answer that question honestly i talk about how i would have wanted to learn to revise earlier than i ended up doing but that's not what set me thinking this time what set me thinking was about the idea of opportunity cost uh when people ask me you know what i change how would i like my career to have been different uh what things do i miss i've been thinking about opportunity cost a lot lately particularly because my children are still wrestling with this concept right a few a few weeks ago we went and did this haunted ski lift thing that they have in the mountains here it's very fun i like to do it i you know you get a big thermos of hot chocolate you sit on the ski lift and then you know people make weird noises at you as you go up and down works very well for when you're social distancing because you're always quite a fair distance away from them and my son joel who's 13 could not decide if he wanted to go or not because he realized he could stay home and um he could play video games instead and there was a game he was really interested in playing and he wrestled with this decision to an extent that was kind of uh strange to us adults were like come on just get out go with us we're going to the thing if you want to stay fine make the decision but just make the decision and he had so much trouble and i remember that when i was young i remember that fear of missing out that idea that i can't have both of these things at once what is the right answer and coming to understand that there are a lot of questions for which there is no right answer or perhaps there is no way to know the right answer yet uh because you know the events haven't happened yet obviously if he started playing his video game the internet went out and he couldn't play it anymore he will have wished to have gone on the ski lift but if he picks the ski lift and then we get in a car wreck he probably would have preferred to stay home but in most cases there's not a right answer to that question even after having gone through it it's just about making the call in the moment now this is not that difficult a concept uh to to deal with we wrestle with this a lot as we grow up it's one of the things that we have to have to figure out is how to make decisions and um for the most part in my life the this decision-making process has gotten easier and easier i've learned to stop stressing the little questions so much and if i get order a meal and i don't like it and i wish i'd gotten the next one well i'll just chalk that up to next time to order the other thing but there is one question that the older i've gotten the more difficult the opportunity cost has become to me and that question is what should i write next this is a very very difficult question for me nowadays when early in my career it was not it was very easy i wrote whatever i was excited about right uh and particularly early in my career which i'll talk about a few minutes i just kind of had to write it didn't really matter what i was writing but these days i'm coming to realize you know that every story i choose to tell basically kills a thousand other ones and this is growing intimidating there's nothing i like more about being a writer than the idea of taking the blank page and making something out of it people often ask me what is the most fun part about being a writer i usually joke it's the fact that i get to get up at noon and go to bed at four right i really do like that i am a night owl but the truth is one of my favorite aspects genuinely is being able to essentially create something out of nothing i know it doesn't work with the actual physics but it feels like i'm combating entropy um when i am taking a blank page and you know completely formless ideas and turning them into a novel granted i'm not actually doing that because i'm creating increasing the heat in the universe and propelling us ever toward the heat death of the universe but in my brain i have made something out of nothing it's like a magic trick right um the one of the fun things about being a writer and artist is that you could legitimately lock me in a room with a blank notepad walk away and come back and then there would be a book and probably a lot of mad ravings depending on how long you left me but i really like that about my job but at the same time that blank page is intimidating not in that the way that it is i think for a lot of new writers the blank page intimidates new writers because they see how much work there is to do the blank page intimidates me because as soon as i start writing as i said something to those pages that means i am locked in to another story and for the most part these stories are going to take between 6 months and eighteen months of my life to create and there's only so many of those one person can do in their life um life has been kind of hard lately for a lot of us things have been really kind of weird instead of a massive cool release party at a convention center uh we get to sit here with almost every well everyone but me wearing masks having to deal with a release party where technical difficulties are making it difficult even for the people who wanted to watch us to be able to do that um life is kind of frustrating these days and so i was thinking about my talk and about this idea of opportunity costs and i thought you know the thing i really want to do tonight is i want to take a retrospective my career career so far and i want to talk to you about the books that didn't make it uh multiple books that never got published that i worked on some of which i finished some of which i didn't and kind of use each of these books as a way to talk about how i chose what projects to work on at that point in my life and we're going to kind of approach four different parts of my career this way and so the um first one we'll do in a minute but we also are going to break these up so i'm not blaming at you the entire time with some questions so i'm going to have isabel come over here and bring us our next two questions which i'll answer before i get into era one of the brandon career so question is how do you feel about the release of rhythm of war is it different from how you felt about releasing uh any of the previous stormlight books well yes the release party in particular is very different um i will admit i miss the big party what i don't miss is the fact that isaac and i usually leave those big parties at around five in the morning having signed straight from like 10 o'clock until 5 am and even doing that we only get to a fraction of the people who come to the release party because you know we pre-signed the books but this is for personalizations and granted i stay up until 4 o'clock so going to bed at five or six or whatever not a big deal for me but man is that part of it exhausting um and so not missing that aspect of it though i am missing the enthusiasm of the crowd and being able to see you all and being able to hand you all your books because we're having to deal with shipping and i know some people are going to get lost or not get there in time uh by the way cara someone was watching the uh the lives or the the sped up time lapse of a signing and found a book that i forgot to sign oh my goodness they pointed it out and said he didn't sign that one it's one of the ones i drew a picture on and i didn't drew a signature so if you get the one i didn't sign i didn't i didn't i drew a picture but did not sign uh you may send that back to us and we will sign it and send it back to you or you can just ask us to send you another one we'll figure it out but sorry and eagle-eyed person good job but regardless i i do kind of miss that i really don't miss the tour uh and so flying around and things like that this is why i called you guinea pigs because i think that uh we are going to be experimenting with this and hopefully be doing something more like this for future releases probably with a big release party and a large crowd but also streamed um with adam's excellent uh practice at streaming and things like that around to the world um so um anything else about the release of rhythm of war um you know that is different um we are getting to the near the end of the first arc of the stormlight archive um and this book is kind of a different turning point for the series for reasons you'll understand as you're reading the book the first three books which were the cal and shalon dalinar books were in many ways well much better formed in my head when i started and in particular the last two books had a lot of things get changed during the course of the first three books and so while i'm very confident in the book now during the beta read there were there were just a lot more things uh that came up than i was that i wasn't anticipating um that happens in everyone but in this one it felt like there were a few extra ones so um i don't know i i feel really good about the book uh but man it was a lot of work i think this is was the most work we've put into a stormlight book um that it might only feel that way because we have the kickstarter going on at the same time let's do the other question on the back of that one thank you isabel is there once uh only one seon for every given noun yes there is so a good ant question now um there is only one c one for every a own but um there are aeons that you don't know about yet so um so i'm going to move into part one of uh of the the reading group and i'm going to sit down for this part um and so you can see the the fire going beside me and i'll be reading from my laptop here in a minute but first i want to look back at these early days and kind of talk to you about how i picked projects in the early days of my career um back then all i knew is that i wanted to be a writer for a living i wasn't very good at this i didn't know what i was doing um really i had no clue and so i've often said that the first one of the first things i did is just write a bunch of different stories in a bunch of different genres this was really good for me a lot of writers i know kind of go into becoming a writer thinking they're meant to write one thing maybe it's because it's the popular thing or maybe it's just because that's what their friends are doing and then they experiment with different genres and find they have real talent in other areas this happened to dan wells who tried writing epic fantasy and it felt you know like he was pounding his head against the wall he says and then he tried writing horror novels and they just worked so much better for him and so i tried a lot of different things um and so early this early part of my career um i um i just wrote i just it was more important for me to tell stories than what i was telling in fact there's a there's an interesting thing about this that i hope that you all get to experience some day and it doesn't have to be with writing a book but it comes down to finishing and doing something you thought was really difficult my first book white sand took me three plus years to write and before that i had tried writing a novel as a teenager and it just i'd never finished it it happens a lot when you're a teenage writer but something very magical pun intended happened when i finished white sand suddenly this thing that in my head was this really really difficult task that someday i would accomplish was done i was a novelist i had written a novel it wasn't any good but that didn't matter at the moment because i had actually accomplished it and i think the single most meaningful moment in my career was not hitting the new york times list or things like that or even even being uh called for the wheel of time uh which would probably take second the first most meaningful moment was realizing i could actually finish a novel um that changes at least it changed my life in ways that i just cannot calculate or explain and i would hope that everyone has this experience with something my wife ran a marathon and running a marathon feels like one of these impossible things that you know i could never do but yet she did it and finishing novels the same way as soon as i finished white sand my next book didn't take three years it took six months because suddenly i had moved from a realm of trying this herculean impossible thing and to being someone who had done that already and knew what kind of work and effort it took and it was quantifiable to me i actually you'll find this amusing the first time i uh i got into a steady relationship um i have the same sort of emotional feeling i'm like well that wasn't actually so hard i've been stressing about this for years and years and years getting a girlfriend and now i have one and i'm like wow i that actually can happen and my whole life changed and from then on i generally was dating somebody right it was no longer this impossible thing uh that uh that you know could never happen it was something that could happen uh same thing with a book and um so during those early years my mind really started to flood with possibilities once i'd finished that book once i'd finished white sand i'm like well what else could i do with this what else could i write uh what else should i try and so my early books um i wrote two epic fantasies which were really the same book i just white sand got long enough that i felt that it was an ending and i just kind of ended it um and i wrote a comedy comedic fantasy and kind of the bob asprin vein um and i wrote two science fiction novels and i'm going to read um one of these to you today i'm going to read from my fifth novel which i had named the sixth incarnation of pandora which is a very weird and clunky title i was not terribly good at titles back then but uh one of the reasons i'm going to read to you this is because i don't think i've ever done a reading from this before in my life which is kind of cool to think about and another reason i wanted to read to you is there's actually a scene from this i picked this scene from the book specifically because when i was working on rhythm of war i was writing a scene and i'm like i have written this sometime before where was this why how did i when was this and i couldn't remember for a long time until finally it hit me i'm like oh of course it was from uh sixth incarnation and so i'm going to read you the scene that has that same scene those of you who are beta readers who've read the book or employees who had it early you'll be able to pick it out quite easily um so what is the sixth incarnation of pandora uh so uh this is a story you may think pandora the planet because you know of the movie that's not what i was i was actually going for the myth um that there were uh that in this society we had opened up various pandora's boxes and this was in philosophy in the far future the sixth one they'd opened uh was making uh people who were immortal um and this was a pandora's box that they had philosophically opened and it's a story it's i often describe it as a cyberpunk it's not actually a cyberpunk it's not a true cyberpunk it deals with some of those same themes it has the kind of corporate corporations in charge and kind of a dystopian future um and things like this but it is far future um and not near future as most cyberpunk is the story is about an immortal soldier who has been made immortal with this new process which is still very rare and very expensive to do and what they he is basically a one-person army um with all of these modifications of things and is capable of destroying entire armies on his own and is completely indestructible um and i'm going to read to you from chapter one which does is not a good chapter for introducing that concept but um you know i i was still learning how to write you'll also notice that i did description back in the day a little bit more differently from how i do it now i maybe lingered a bit i maybe had a little bit more of robert jordan's uh influence on me i actually trimmed out about half the description in this uh just to make it uh make it work and so i'm gonna read to you from this for a little while it has a little epigraph at the beginning which i thought you guys would find fun because um you know i use those quite a bit now and i didn't earlier in my career and these again this book is unpublished this is book number five the sixth incarnation of pandora from the moment the first primeval neanderthal picked up a sharp rock and used it to eviscerate his prey man has sought ways to use his surroundings to augment his own abilities not that much has changed over the millennia or not that much has changed over the millennia peg legs have become prosthetic limbs and spectacles have been replaced with robot cyborg optronic optronics but the main ideas remain constant displeased with what fate allots us we bend nature before our will becoming more than we were intended among all of god's creations only man takes offense at his lowly state along with our drive to change ourselves there comes with a true human parrot with true human paradoxical form the uncomfortable fear that we have gone too far through the ages we have fabricated horrors to match our increasing supremacy over nature monsters golems mad robots and horrors haunt our collective technological unconsciousness twisted mixes of flesh and metal obscene misuses of nature and her creations we push ourselves to be better and better more in control and dominant but at the same time we sweat and worry that this time we have gone too far we finally have i am the final step the ultimate synthesis of what is natural and what is profane one last grand adulteration i am the culmination of our fears of frankenstein's monster for the modern 23rd century i am without parallel in life or imagination i am zelian i got a lot pithier at making my epigraphs i feel um as time progressed uh chapter one the forest silence was abnormal almost uncomfortable zelian could feel the dew in the air and hong has an unseen mist around him humidity was an unfamiliar companion and he had to fight the impulse to wipe his brow a damp sweat stained hand would do little good in drying a damp sweat stained forehead he could feel the soft film of water on his skin coating his entire body making his fingers both slip and stick as he rubbed them together also unfamiliar with the shadow forest shadowy illumination light he knew darkness he knew the forest unchanging twilight however was neither bright nor dark it seemed to flow rather than shift live rather than just illuminate it was neither day nor night it was light undead zelian followed no mark trail he had left that behind long ago it was not difficult to move through the brush tall trunks stood like jealous merchants catching the golden light long before it hit the ground while little light did pass through the formless through was formless and impotent few plants could squeeze enough life out of such meager helpings to survive there were ferns weeds and the occasional sapling but nothing so sicky so thick he couldn't walk through it without trouble occasionally zealand reached out to brush a patch of soft damp uh damp earth it was odd that something native to his home planet would feel so alien to him but had been a long long time since he had seen soil he continued on making good time through the realm of the enormous trees and their tiny fungal blooms you usually only notice the surroundings that something was wrong the forest was different somehow it was pervasive omnip omnipresent even if he closed his eyes he could feel it around him when he stepped he would sense the soft springy loam with each breath he drew in new order uh drew in the odors of wood decaying flora damp foliage and bitter earth he'd hear the crackling of leaves and twigs beneath his feet not sure how that happens when it's obviously so damp but you know the forest was not a setting it was an experience there's uh there's early brandon's descriptions for you no bugs a voice in his head pointed out what zellian asked opening his eyes no insects zealion a forest this size should be brimming with them they would be too hard to control here wire i know i just think it hurts the authenticity you wouldn't say that if you could feel it zelian responded continuing his hike well i doubt that's likely to happen anytime soon wire's voice wasn't sarcastic or even depressed it was simply stating a fact wire could never feel the force just he could never feel anything the entirety of the ai's physical being consisted of a cpo embedded beneath zelion's left shoulder blade we're running out of forest wire pointed out zelia nodded he could see the tree line down now where the forest ended a few moments later he passed through it and the world around him transformed abruptly instead of soft earth his foot snapped against rigid metal he stepped out of the land of half shadows in a full daylight humidity disappeared abandoned in favor of a carefully controlled deliberately comfortable climate zelian left behind the canopy of leaves entering a world where dark space extended forever in all directions he stood on the edge of a sheer drop-off the metal pathway that round around ran around the forest was only a few feet thick here where he stood it also bordered the edge of the platform zelen looked up high in the sky you could see another enormous platform like the one on which he now stood a floating continent with few with people inhabiting all of its six faces beyond the second platform zillion could make out the tiny print picks of pinpricks of stars looking down over the edge of the cliff he could see the exact same thing hundreds of kilometers below lay the bottom of the platform and beyond that was nothing cold space eternity fall off this cliff and one could literally fall forever said that the platform's builders had tried to make it seem as if one were standing on the surface of a planet instead of a gargantuan block of metal hanging in the middle of space a ridiculous distance from any planetary system they hadn't done a very good job zelian took one look back at the forest park really it was one of the few places on sage platform that was dedicated to reminding its inhabitants of their heritage as if they hadn't intentionally abandoned such things as forests when they moved into the sterile vacuum of space remind me to come back here when this project is finished he asked is that a request zelian or you simply waxing hypothetical no really remind me yes zelian wirewood compute a likely date and time for the reminder zelian turned away from the organic gannic wall behind him and stepped off the cliff he could feel the fall again the plummet that would carry him down along the side of the platform until he entered oblivion gravity would drow drag him downward prepared to hurl him into the void but then it changed his foot got caught in an unseen force a pole that altered his momentum his body followed collapsing to the arms of the same force instead of plunging into space zelen swung in an arc around the edge of the cliff his foot planting itself on the vertical wall below him he reoriented himself then pulled his other foot to sit beside its mate he now stood on the other face of the cliff what once been down was now directly in front of him and it he turned around and looked down he saw the space he had left and it looked like a sheer vertical drop the forest seemed to sprout from the side of a cliff the platform's gravity wasn't going to relenquish its grip on zelen quite so easily it pulled one down against the platform no matter which direction down happened to be at the time one could walk on each of the platform's faces and feels as if it were the surface of a planet i don't see why you have to be so dramatic about that zelian wire chimed in why do you find it so fascinating about what do you find so fascinating about changing gravitational surfaces zelian continued to look over the side of the ledge then tossed a small pet pull over watching it normally in the air for a moment then change vectors suddenly to fall inwards snapping against the pathway and rolling to a stop at the edge of the forest is there anything we haven't mastered wire zelian responded what is left to dominate the very laws of nature bend before us where is the excitement in a universe that behaves according to our convenience warping and changing until it twists to the will of the most fickle species if you want excitement you should try piling a ship through the center of a star wire suggested as far as i know no one has managed to conquer that realm yet maybe i will zelian mused just make sure you remove my cpu first wire said so there we go that is a look at how i was writing um back 20 years ago that was from 1999 at least that's what it said at the end of the book when i had when i read i usually wrote the date that i was finishing it so the sixth incarnation of pandora it is uh interesting also for me to look back and see which ideas i have thrown into the word chipper and recycled if you've read starsight you'll recognize something very similar to those platforms which stretched back to a short story that i wrote um called uh defending elysium and so they showed up um probably first time here and then i reused them for defending elysium and then uh wrote the skyward series in that same universe so this is like a hypothetical book that could have existed in that same setting um again i think nowadays i might if i were writing a book about a soldier that most of the book is action explosions i might have gotten a little faster to the actual action and maybe save the waxing philosophical for another part of the story but it is an interesting look back in particular because this was book number five that i wrote and i didn't do a lot of marketing those early books in my career uh though i did take my second book star's end and i did send it around the first batch of uh books i ever sent out was stars in which i sent this to an agent that i had met at a convention um who i later discovered was not really a real agent it was someone from denver and i'm sure they're very nice people but um i send it to them and it got rejected but part of me wonders what happened if i would have aggressively been submitting these early books uh is there a universe where brandon sells stars end uh then they want another science fiction soy sells sixth incarnation of pandora and doesn't start the cosmere because the cosmere starts with elantris which was book number six though i wrote elantra's not really having the cosmere in mind the real development of the cosmere happened in books called dragon steel and aether of night which were unpublished books during that era so it's kind of interesting to imagine if i had become a science fiction writer instead what would have happened would there have been no cosmere hoyd wasn't in any of these early books i wasn't doing that back then the first appearance of hoyd anywhere in any of my books is in elantris where he shows up and then dragon steel which was his backstory so it's just interesting for me to think about opportunity cost we are going to go do a couple more questions and then i'm going to go into the second part where we'll talk about a different air of my career and then after that it's going to be isaac's turn to entertain you for a little while so come on up isabel um of all the magic systems would awakeners be able to uh most quickly be able to uh utilize acquiring a don chard rappo i saw this one early on and i thought you deserved your raffle so let's turn that one around raffo for those who don't know means read and find out it is a phrase i inherited from robert jordan which means i am not going to tell you right now it could mean that the answer is too much a spoiler it could mean that i just want you theorizing on this for a while it could mean that i haven't decided yet it could mean that i got stumped by the question and don't want to answer it because i don't want to look dumb uh those are all equal answers actually there's a fifth one which is the peter and karen know the answer this it's in the notes somewhere and i don't want to say until i can open the notes or ask them so those are all all valid uh interpretations of raffo most often it is the i don't want to answer right now because i worry it will spoil things or lock me in too much to things that i want to do in the future uh can a radiant join multiple orders this was not done in the past or become a squire of a different order it is actually not impossible for this to happen it simply was not done and if daliner became a lightweaver square or had the light weaver on her blade could he create through a shar map himself um this uh is going to depend on factors it is possible but highly implausible following another highly implausible set of sequence of circumstances that would allow him to actually do that though getting the honor blade would not be as difficult let's do one more of those if you wouldn't mind isabel are any of your characters based on somebody you know so a lot of my side characters are based on people i know this is generally because uh it's it's fun to do what we call a tuckerization where we take somebody and put them in a small bit part in a story just to kind of uh have a cameo right a lot of horror writers will do this and then murder the person right dan kills everybody in effigy in his books it's very common i just have people just get walk on parts so mem is in uh you're in the third book right uh so mem when you run into mem that's mems uh mems cameo bridge four is famously made up of a lot of my friends and family members um so you know you will find uh layton who is my friend alan leighton or scar who is my friend scar ethan scars that um and so those i don't quite count as basing a character on someone it's more like giving a cameo to a friend just like if we ever film these things we will try to get everybody who's in the uh in the the company walk on parts uh in the movies and things like that so you can be in the background be like look there i am uh we'll let mem carry along a basket of laundry or something like that um and maybe isaac can be doing a map in the background um but actual based on people oftentimes i will find some interesting attribute about somebody i know and be like wow that attribute spun off and built upon um to become um could become a cornerstone of a character i don't usually say that i'm basing a character on that person but people do inspire characters uh the most uh easiest one to describe would be serene from elantris which was based on my friend slightly on my friend annie who was a good friend at the time and constantly complained about the troubles of being a woman who was taller than six feet in our culture uh there are all sorts of difficulties relating to that that i had never even considered because and it was about my height right i'm six one or between six foot and six one we're about the same height and for me it's like great like this is the perfect height for a guy just over six feet means that you can still shop off the rack uh you can still fit in cars my friend ryan who's dre from bridge4 uh always complained that he can't quite fit in cars because he's six four or six five and there are some cars he couldn't fit in and things and sometimes couldn't buy off the rack i could at six feet but uh so i wasn't too tall but i wasn't too short um you know i i just didn't have that sort of problem that comes along with being of a non-standard height in a culture that uh fixates perhaps too much on it i would i would hazard to guess um and so i thought about that and i'm like that's a cool attribute to talk about uh that i've never done with a character the rest of serene is not annie right the rest of serene uh grew out of what naturally the story needed and who she was and things like that but that one little um part of annie became part of serene so i do that quite often if i find someone just has an interesting conflict in life i will go ahead and steal that and build a character around it so uh there are sometimes at writing conventions you see people walking around with t-shirts that say be careful you'll end up in my book i've always thought that was a nice t-shirt and it is kind of a danger of knowing an author all right as the years of your career progressed as the world and uh your worldviews change has your cosmere your vision of a fantastic universe become more defined defined and detailed or as the picture become muddled by shifts in perspective uh most definitely the first um i wouldn't say that the cosmere has become more muddled the more i've written the more i've experienced the more detailed and more interesting i think it has become and unfortunately the more stories in it i want to tell which comes back to the main theme of what we're talking about and so thank you for that question isabel and whoever gave it to us because that's right on theme uh so i'll go back uh do a little bit more speech no we're gonna do another reading before it's you isaac don't worry there's four of these so he was he's like oh is it my turn um no i i'm gonna talk more first it's what i do um so we talked about that early part of my career uh for those who don't know i wrote 13 novels before i sold one and the book i sold was elantris fortunately for us all because epic fantasy was my first love and elantra's birth the cosmere um and so we are now here doing stormlight because those terrible early books of mine didn't sell so hallelujah um probably the worst thing that could have happened for my career would have been if i would have sold one of those early books um i i sincerely believe that um but um i want to talk to you a little bit about the middle portion of my career kind of the well is this the middle portion the early part of my actual career how about that um because i um i sold elantris and that was one of those other big hurdles the the impossible thing that in the future like someday i wanted to do was someday sell a book and when that one happened i did not think wow that was easy um in fact when that one happened i was like on my knees saying thank you because uh for those who don't know the story i just got a voicemail from an editor one day who wanted to buy elantris i won't go into the whole story you can watch it on my youtube i've talked about it but i was i went through a hard part of my career writing these some some books that i thought were kind of mediocre and then i wrote way of kings and then i sold elantris uh and suddenly possibility opened again right suddenly ah i was a published novelist and suddenly i could do whatever i wanted um and people would actually it seemed give me money for it in fact the next seven books i wrote uh which were mistborn novels warbreaker and uh three of the alcatraz books all sold like immediately um and each book i i i released with a little little deviation with mistborn uh that i'll talk about a little bit later i sold better than the ones before everything was going great um and at this part in my career i really started to think about what did i want the scope of my um my life to be and this is the time um who was emily do you remember who was there with us were we're even there there was a dinner that i did at outback steakhouse uh where i told people for the first time about mistborn being nine books it would have happened in 2005 or 2006 probably 2006 um and i can't even remember who was there with me were you there isaac i feel like i um but i remember that one and then uh shortly thereafter early 2007 i showed you the outline for the cosmere uh which you say you still have somewhere we haven't been able to find it um but i sat down and i drew out kind of a visual of uh the cosmere as i imagined it this was when i was working on the uh the mistborn trilogy and hadn't written it yet um and we'll have to find that and see if we can publish it for people uh you guys will probably find it interesting i do know that uh dragon steel was seven books um in that outline which i've since shrunk that one to three books i've stolen so much for storm light but it had stormlighted ten books and dragon steel at seven books and uh mistborn at nine books well mistborn's probably going to be at least 13 and dragon steel is probably gonna be three and that one would have had white sand novels that eventually we were doing as novellas rather than his novels so it's going to just be interesting for you guys to look at it probably has three books for war breaker which i now feel is probably two but we'll we'll try to pop that out but that was all during the 2006 2007 era of my life when suddenly everything was working and everything and i i started to be like maybe i can actually do this maybe i can make it bigger than just writing you know the novels maybe i can bring this whole thing together and i remember talking to my editor moshe about some of the things i wanted to do and he said wow you're ambitious and i hadn't yet told him about the 36 book outline that i'd just done for the cosmere this was just for pitching him on era two of mistborn and i'm like oh moshe oh moshe you have no idea um but it's actually kind of working in that early part of my career of my published career things worked really well until the liar of partnel and the liar of pardon now is the first book that did not work um of that career i had had this happen to me once before uh it's book number nine i call it myth walker pieces of it ended up being uh part of um warbreaker but uh this was my ninth book i had tried writing it and something just had felt off uh honestly at the time i thought you know i feel like i'm repeating myself too much there's something too similar about this story and the one i just finished which was dragon steel um but either way i've given up on that book the only book that i gave up other than that one in high school well then i hit liar partner this was my first and i guess my second my second stab after dragon steel at ahoyd backstory uh this takes place on yolin the kind of original planet in the cosmere named after jane yolen um and was involving how um hoyd became hoyt uh and all of those things with uh many twists and turns that uh i am not at liberty to discuss because i still someday want to do this but it was really it bothered me a ton that the book was not working um and i soldiered through i wrote the whole novel it's 200 000 words long which is about how long books that i wrote were back then uh the long books were two hundred thousand and the short books were fifty thousand now the long books are five hundred thousand and the short books are a hundred thousand but um you know um and the things that were fifty thousand all just became novellas um so but i finished it i soldiered through but the book just wasn't there um now i had also had this emotion before with way of king's prime but with way of king's prime i had always assumed i would find a way to fix it and release it i just need to do some revisions turns out i need to rewrite the whole book from scratch which is what i'm going to have to do with this one at some point but i wanted to read to you from this book from the middle of the book some of the early chapters i put up on my website um i don't know if we'll ever release this book for people to read some of the other ones like mistborn prime and final empire prime we are going to release dragon steel we're going to release this one i'm not sure which ideas will end up in the eventual hoyt backstory that i write uh but there's a there's a nice scene in here uh that is very uh indicative of kind of the things i do in writing and it's indicative of this early part of my published career and the choices i was making because i was trying at this point to establish a legacy right i was trying to build something bigger than just um a trilogy or some books or anything like that i wanted the entire cosmere to be a thing and i think that is part of what really made this feel tragic to me was the fact that i had such lofty aspirations and then the book just turned out to be mediocre it's not a bad book it's just a mediocre book it's probably worse book the worst book i wrote during this era um worse than way of king's prime for sure um and worse than the published books and i couldn't stand for this important book to be mediocre and so i never released it um but i'm gonna read to you um a story so the uh the lead up to this is in this world um there are two competing ecologies there's something we call feign and something we call troon um and in this region uh humankind they basically can't live uh in the faint ecology there's something called skull moss that grows over everything and changes the plants they become poisonous and the animal flesh humans can't survive on and so at the we are in a city that is surrounded entirely by feign life this this la it's grown around and there's a ring around the city no one knows why it hasn't taken over the city um and into this comes midias an apprentice light weaver um who uh has been tasked with helping the people of the city by a mysterious mentor figure um that you're not gonna find out about but there will be some some little clues and he is brand new at this barely knows what he's doing and has been tasked with figuring out the mystery and trying to save the city before it falls to the fame he's entered the city shown off some of his powers had a different response from what he expected and now he's found a kind of a home in a basically a soup kitchen for the poor that is run that they're the people who let him in so this is from the liar of partnel i want an opportunity to perform a story for these people midia said rizal snorted like you performed for the king with that dragon today midius frowned they stood in the kitchen and missed rizal's bubbling pots kale dutifully stirring one to the left the man hadn't needed to be asked already the room was beginning to fill with unemployed people they sat staring at their tables waiting to be fed how do you know about the dragon midius asked rizal dumped a handful of spices into one of the pots it's all over the city jess i think it was in it was incredibly poor taste to make the image eat an illusionary soldier i did nothing of the sort but you did create an illusion of a monster yes madison made it admitted and now you want me to let you do something similar in here nothing so drastic midi as promised just a simple story why i thought you were here to save the city or something i'm working on that midia said in the meantime i'd like to tell a story i think it might help these men lift their burdens rizal stopped pouring spices she folded her arms looking up at midias look light weaver she said you think your lies are going to make these men happy you think you can feed their children of the story the jesus failed us your master he failed us wait when was this before was all said waving a hand when taureg took control from theos father the jest tried to placate the people tried to tell them that a new age was coming they spoke of art and beauty and you know what their king couldn't feed us people starved by the hundreds why do you think we turned to theos midia's frown deepened he knew the story the history differently taurag had killed theos's father true but it hadn't been the jess's influence that had caused the problems during torah singer tumultuous year of rule had been the lack of alliances poor trade instincts and general and settlement in the city and yet the jesus had supported him that was part of the reason theos had exiled them still resolves version was skewed or perhaps midiasis was his master had taught him the past was very difficult to pin down as fluid as river waters he called history wet paints on the tapestry mixing and melding in liquid form creating images and scents that never remain stable mazal midia said you suffer the philosophers even though i can tell you think their talk is frivolous well even if you see my stories frivolous i ask you to let me tell them you're as bad as that godspeaker always pushing me to do things fine tell your story but only after you've served food during the beginning rush very well midia said though i do wonder why we even do it this way would it be faster to have the men line up and pass through to get their soup these men spend all day waiting in line jess she said they wait for hours standing in the sun hoping to be one of the few that gets a chance to work i don't intend to make them wait here too get to work midias took a bat stack of bulls and moved over to kale's quadrant filling two of them you're good at getting what you want jess the soldier said media shrugged i would have thought that you'd be poor at that after living so long alone in the forest i wasn't alone in the forest media said taking the bulls and turning i had my master it wasn't really an answer but midius didn't feel like giving the real answer he'd always been good at making things he wanted happen it was just the way that life was the world worked as he wanted save for the notable exceptions midius didn't let him dwell on that however he mourned over his master's death enough he moved about delivering bowls of food to the men even after only one day in the kitchen the work became rote to him that left him to think and consider trying to decide the best story for the situation his opportunity came soon the tide of hungry men slowing medius reproached rizal setting down an empty bull and met her eyes behind him the sounds of dozens of wooden spoons scraping ceramic bowls echoed in the chamber result turned away and waved in a different hand so medius turned and felt the increasingly familiar flutter in his chest he grimaced a man who had killed as many shouldn't have such so doesn't feel such nervousness and yet there it was perhaps a sign that he was more human that he'd often give himself credit i've tried speaking about history he announced to the room and i was ignored some of the eating men paused glancing at him it was easy to make his voice carry it was so few people talking i've tried showing a monster but i got the wrong reaction from that i've caused enough fear in my life and i did not come to partnel to bring more minious put his hand out to the side and dropped a handful of dust he wove the light into an image of a beautiful blonde woman wearing a blue crown so mydia said sitting back on a stool today i'll try a romance many of the men perked up at the appearance though not a few muttered instead i honestly didn't know a lot about romance myself or i honestly don't know a lot about romance myself midia said tossing a handful of dust to the other side weaving the light into the image of a princely man with a copper crown but then neither have i ever met a dragon but i can craft one from light well enough besides i do know one thing when it comes to romance women are fickle but men are fools he smiled to the audience most of them watched him however they didn't respond as his master had indicated when he called women fickle he expected grunts of ascent and when he called men fools his intonation should have garnered a few chuckles he got neither minius moved on throwing a handful of dust behind himself weaving the light and blocking the sight of rizal in her plots pots instead creating an image of a richly decorated room complete with a bronze rimmed looking glass and deeply dyed rugs now this was a time before the coming of the feign midia said many of my stories are from that time it does us good to remember that our lives were once more than they are now lily was known in seven cities as the most beautiful to be born in some hundred years time wives spoke of her when they washed clothing and rivers laborers passed news while they cut wheat in the field even children knew of lily eventually news reached prince helios heir to the throne of lions hill now helius was not a vain man nor was he particularly demanding he was however an inquisitive man this news troubled him what would the most beautiful woman in the world look like how would she dress what color were her eyes how would she keep her hair he asked after these things but no one could give him a detailed answer another handful of dust produced a group of scribes and scholars speaking with helius who stood to his left lily however continued to comb her hair in the room to his right looking into her mirror it was a challenging illusion emidius felt himself being drawn into the image transfixed by it he found it hard to pay attention to the audience as he continued to speak helius determined that he would have to discover lily's beauty for himself though his father the king objected helius left that day to ride for nan hell the woman's the fair woman's purported home helius's room dissolved and shimmered transforming to an image of a prince riding on horseback even focused on the illusion as he was midias could hear cries of surprise from the men at the tables as they saw the prince riding atop a full-sized horse the illusion remained steady the horse staying in place despite its galloping and meters carefully added the faint sound of hoofbeats helius's road was long and hard he continued giving a slight image of rainfall to the illusion washing over the prince and as he approached the city helix began to encounter crowds and large troops of men he was not the only one who had come to see lily's beauty indeed from the processions he soon began to pass he wasn't even the only prince who would come though he certainly was the most poor and the most humble he hadn't even brought a single manservant his only companion was his trusted and aged bodyguard what's more so many had come to see this princess that they crowded in tents along the walls outside even every inn in the city was completely full but prince helius was clever as well as inquisitive he found an empty nook on the street and there he began erecting a fine expensive tent the beggars who lived there were surprised to see one so rich pitching there but the prince did not acknowledge them instead chatting with his bodyguard and making up a story about how this street was the perfect location to view the princess when she went on her secret morning rides within a few hours news had spread and all imaginable kinds of people had crowded the street to stake a claim on space elias retreated to an end and was able to get a room from one of those who had left in order to sleep on the street as his faithful bodyguard bedded down on the floor helios sat by the window pondering and he spotted an old woman walking among those in the street saying something that seemed to make people there angry her attitude intrigued helios and he sent his guard out to fetch the old woman midius threw out dust in front of him creating the image of the old woman he was completely engrossed in his own telling prepared to move on to the old woman's warning that that princess lily was cursed as he began this part however the illusion wavered rosal cautiously poking through causing a shimmering of sparkling dust to fall to the ground and shatter the back wall of helius's room medius blinked brought out of his own story enough to again become aware of the audience many of the men were muttering loudly and some had left the room leaving their soup behind me he shook his head coming conscious again his illusion disintegrating people objects rooms melting down into bits of dust if you've had your chance just resolve snapped stop frightening these men away but the story they don't care about your story jess lies and feign illusions what good are they fame illusions you think what i do is feign well it's not natural i'll say that midius looked around sensing the hostility in the faces of the watching men embarrassed he stood the last of his illusions exploding in the dust behind him then he rushed from the room moving to his chambers once there he threw a handful of dust against the wall summoning his master's figure medius room was dim since he'd brought no candle at the age of light we were formed from the dust sitting on midias's bed you lied to me media said well i am a liar the master said so are you we don't lie about important things all of our lives are important you know that media's turned away they're supposed to welcome my stories how often do you mention the joy that men find in storytelling how often do you talk of lies and their power to bring emotion they're supposed to love me not revile me is that why you're here mideast to find love media is glanced at his master so i should stop focus only on the corrupted a lad saving partner involves so much more than simply stopping the corrupted these people they live but they no longer remember why they eat with dull stairs they work the fields without laughter they return home to their families worried and frightened that they'll get sick or that they will lose a child to the year of sacrifice or the true ring will finally collapse leave them all without a home there's little i can do about that you can remind them that there's more to life than pain fear and sorrow that's the true calling of a just you look to give them stories that have meaning but the most important meaning of your lies has nothing to do with a moral has to do with the way that it makes people feel not the way that it makes them think they don't want to feel they can't be if they can't see how if they can't see how it'll feed them or bring them wealth they don't want it they were violet they call it superstition or foolishness they care nothing for what i offer no his master said they do care but they're afraid midias this thing that you do it does a noble and grand work when you tell a story you make men see through the eyes of someone whom they've never known when they hear the tell of a widow's pain for a moment they are that widdle widow when they hear a child's play they remember what it was to be a child themselves when they see a hero win for a short time they succeed as well they have may have forgotten what this means but that is part of being human your duty then is merely to remind them and there we go we'll stop there that is from the liar partner wearing its moral a little bit much on the sleeve for a scene that was about not teaching with morals i suspect but that book failed and i never released it but someday i will have something more for you along those same lines right now i'm planning to write hoyt's backstory after i finish light 10. so we've got a little bit of a weight first i am going to break now and i drink some water and isaac is going to take over and he's going to talk to you about the art from this book and i'll be back afterward with two more readings for you okay so we're going to blank the screen for a few minutes while we set up but we will be back so don't go anywhere all right and we're back to the rhythm of war launch event i am isaac stewart i am brandon's art director at dragon steel entertainment he tells the stories tonight tonight i show the pictures together we are one lightweighter so some other things i do at uh dragon stills i i design the books i help with some of the merch as well we all wear different hats if you catch us sometime we can tell you about it so hopefully everybody has their books in hand now i want you to pick it up take a good look at it okay everything in that book had to be designed in some way it it had to have some kind of blueprint put together before we we created it and i'm going to tell you a little bit about how we go from point a to point b not the writing part not the editing part we're going to focus on the art first off i do want to tell give tor a big applause they they listen to what we ask them to do on the book and it turns out beautifully they let us put tons of art in this they let us create a book that is unlike your normal hardcover books that you get at the store in many ways so big round of applause please for tour all right so where did this start it was early 2019 and tor comes to brandon and me and sends an email and says hey brandon's going to write a light he's gonna start storm light four this year what's going to be on the cover so each week brandon and i have an art review review for about half an hour and we talked about that what is going to go on this cover we need to write up a description we use our experience from the previous covers and we come up with something what locations have we shown which characters have we shown on the covers and we narrowed it down to this time shalon in shadesmar we thought this is the cover that we want we haven't seen shadesmar before on a cover we haven't seen shalon and i'm going to we're going to put this on the screen this is the first one this is what we sent to tour shalon in shadesmar holding her shard blade around her are crystalline trees the book underneath the dust jacket will be purple to match the other the order of knight's radiant in the book so using purples in the obsidian like obsidian-like stone and trees might be nice so that was the description that we sent and a little while later once this this uh description got sent to our overseas partners and things i got an email from petar penav in bulgaria he's an artist and he said hey shalon can't have a shard blade in shades of art so thankfully we have people looking out for us and we we adjusted that to just have shalon and shadesmar and and uh i'm glad that we were saved from that sort of duh moment so um so uh we we talked to michael about that and then we uh we we send michael some things michael whalen who did the beautiful cover that we have um i hope that all of you have been able to go and watch the interview that he we posted on the youtube channel if you haven't go uh go take a look at it sometime we send them a cover template and adam will you put the cover template up and we're just giving our best guess where is the text going to be we know where brandon's name is going to be and we just kind of put the the title on there how it might look i send that to michael so he can start sketching up ideas within that we don't want to wind up having to adjust the the art later for the text to fit in there so it's good to have this from the beginning also very early on in the process we decided to involve ben mcsweeney because he has worked with michael before doing concept art and that was very helpful michael said let's let's go ahead and get him involved and um michael said it would be good for us to send him some thumbnails and the way that this would help this is thumbnails of what the cover could be shalon and shadesmar is what we gave as the as the concept how might this play out in grayscale thumbnails we do this to explore dead ends so that michael can see these and say oh i don't have to go down that avenue and he can expend his time working more on the thumbnails and the process or the the concepts that he thinks might pan out a little better so uh adam if you'll bring up number three there so number three we've got a couple of and they're really rough they're just grayscale we've got a little tiny couple of pixels that represent challan and then in the background we have a fortress that you see that wound up on the back of the cover you can go to number four and now this this is ben and me we are just exploring different avenues of what the cover could be we send them to michael and let michael use them as he would at the same time brandon's writing the book we're getting more and more scenes so when more scenes come through with shalon and shadesmar we're sending some of these to michael we're sending him pieces of the book as brandon says it's ready to go and we we explored a couple of other ideas as well ultimately michael settled on the idea of shalon on the front adeline on the back with the fortress of lasting integrity also on the back so knowing that michael wanted adeline and shalon on this wrap around dust cover dust jacket um we again went to ben and said ben let's do some concepts of adeline and challan what are their cl what is their clothing like what is their traveling clothing like michael asked us for this because again it helps him make sure that that he's providing a vision that we are looking for and of course he does his own take on this as well so let's let's put some of those up so uh we've got the first one here is a concept of shalon i believe i don't have it right here in front of me i should just pull him up huh and that that's what we sent to michael next we have the uh one of adeline and you can see that we tried to slip a sword in there again because we wanted a sword somewhere on the cover so we're like hey adeline can bring a sword so those are our costumes right there um i think ultimately michael hit a home run with this cover when he uh he used all of these elements he put it together there were a lot of back and forth where in art review i'd show brandon the progress we would give some feedback or make some comments and michael was just great as an aside the cover is available right now as a print over on his website so go take a look at that we have a video from michael where he talks about his process working with us a little bit can you tell us a little bit about what your process was like working with tor and with us dragon steel on the on this cover what was our our process for coming up with um the final product here um well what i i get a uh a partially finished manuscript and uh because my schedule is so i get booked up in advance so much uh it's not and plus irene the people at tour know that i'm so bad with deadlines that it's important to get something to me get me working on something as early as possible so uh often um i'm working uh using uh maybe the first half or two thirds of uh of uh manuscript on a book and it's uh first draft at that so um that but that there's so much in your books that i don't need more than that to get me going for obviously but uh um there's actually uh you know i know it's it's easy for artists uh working in my field to uh complain about art direction but if you want to know the truth with brandon's books i could use a lot more art direction if if i was told we want to see something on chapters 2 or 3 or 13 and 12 that would make my job a lot easier because there's so much to consider in these books so many possible avenues that an illustrator can go down that and so many story arcs and and uh character tracks and uh plot tracks that are going through the narrative it's uh i find it overwhelming and uh i find myself illustrating a lot of things that are drawing a lot of things in my sketchbooks or whatever that don't end up um in the final painting that's it's never something that i i regret because uh the fans have been very generous in wanting to own them and you know it's something i can develop for my own uh pleasure and and sell at a convention or art show or on my website or whatever but um in terms of getting the painting done on time i think i could actually use uh even more uh art direction and the thing about dragon steel and tor is that you guys have been almost totally hands off about uh you i've never had so much creative freedom on a project as i've had uh working with uh you on this and uh i really appreciate your willingness to let me kind of have my head on on where i'm going on on these things but after i come up with the initial landscape uh concept then there's a lot of back and forth between uh dragon steel and me and uh tora's been like i said almost hands off in that regard and and uh letting us communicate directly which is such a rare thing maybe it's more common these days but in the 80s and 90s i had to fight with some of the book companies i dealt with trying to uh seek input get input from the author on on how to correctly visualize a particular character or scene in a book that i feel would be important to have on the book cover and which i've never understood because i it seems very counterproductive to me but uh anyway uh that's there hasn't been an issue with tour books or with dragon steel so um it's been extremely helpful for me to see ben mcsweeney's visualizations he's been an enormous help for me and um if i had to come up with some of the the uh plant forms uh outside of seeing where he was going with them i feel that i would have really gone astray and and his visualizations just i think are so spot on and have been done in collaboration with brandon are an invaluable guide for me and i can take them and then kind of run with them and even carry them a little further in a direction i think would be evocative of of the the landscape and the story but uh that's been an invaluable aid for me and something that uh i appreciate very much it's been great wonderful experience chris and i think that michael deserves a huge round of applause for doing this i i have found that he's not just an amazing artist he's also an amazing individual and we're just we're so grateful to have him on uh team stormlight basically so um let's move on here so let's rewind back now to march 2019 again because a lot of things just we had to put a lot of things in place from the beginning there brandon began writing the book and we decided to get a head start on the art he already had in mind some of the things that we needed he wanted nine challan pieces of the radiant spring that that helped make knight's radiant so the first thing that we had to do was go and find out about all the radiant spread and which which ones we knew a lot about and which ones we didn't know a lot about karen our continuity editor was very helpful in this and compiling a lot of this information a lot of the information we wound up using to make the knights radiant quiz that we released later in the year this year so we started gathering this all together and the ones we didn't know a whole lot about we just kind of left till the end so that brandon could write the book and fill in some of those details as he went writing the book we've got ben mcsweeney in again who does the the shalon sketchbook pages in every book and he has done an excellent job with the spread pieces and we're going to start showing a few of those there was an interview with ben a little bit earlier where he goes through the process of the how we did the cultivation spread the honor spread and the ash spring and but we're just going to show all nine of these and and talk about them a little bit so all right so the first ones here that we have we have a mist spread the cryptic and the ashbrin some of these we talked about earlier in the video with ben but these were these were a lot of fun to put together i i will say that it was it was interesting on each time i would bring these into art review with brandon and we would we would discuss where do we want this to go and sometimes some of these hit the mark right away and a few of them it took a few iterations to to get them to the point where it felt more like what brandon wanted um it was fun to also see as ben was drawing his cryptic drawings to see other fan art out there that was hitting the same thing and i've noticed this with brandon's art a lot that her brandon's uh writing a lot that uh he can write something and several different artists can interpret it in different ways and yet you know exactly what it is and i think that i think that is a a testament to the the details that he chooses to give us that it evokes something that we can all kind of concretely see very similar things um if we move on to the next next page we have the honor spread who had a they have a big part in the book and we've we've seen honor spread for a really long time so for ben to start fleshing this out was a it was a lot of fun then we have the cultivation spran with a little bit of the sort of window looking character down at the bottom i'm just showing off art here and i one of the things that i really love about this is ben was able to give each of the kind of the cultures of spren a different sort of clothing and a different sort of look that evokes this bigger society behind some of these things and i um i just really really like some of that stuff let's go on to the next one my favorite one of these i think is the simplest one for some reason it's the high spring and um they're they look like tears in reality that look out on unfamiliar starry skies and i just think those are so cool next we have the peak spread that that look a little a little bit like the unkalaki in their clothing and in their designs and then the ink spread which i think is kind of fun he did a little drawing there at the bottom that looks like yazna's the side of yazna's face with her ink spread sitting there so ben did a great job on these um it's great to have him on the team now let's move on so another thing that we knew we were going to need were end papers and this is still the book's being written i have to get end papers going you know from oathbringer that we have started this series of heralds that and brandon you can tell me if i'm wrong on this but you kind of got this idea when he went to the sistine chapel and saw the different renditions of the apostles they're kind of this typical the prophets thank you the different prophets and the different symbols that went with each of the prophets and he thought let's do something like that for roshar and but with the heralds and so we dreamed up this gallery of ten paintings by different artists that presumably would be in world rocharan artists uh painting this for a gallery somewhere and uh part of that idea was that we would commission physical paintings so that we could hang them up somewhere in the last book we had howard lyon do two wonderful paintings he's here with us tonight we had dan dos santos do two wonderful paintings as well we uh for this next book i wasn't exactly sure which heralds we were going to put on the end papers and so i commissioned the remaining six not knowing exactly what we were going to put in the book many of you might remember when we revealed donato's wonderful tall herald and wonder why is that not in the book it's just that once we got all the heralds in it just felt like that one needed to be saved for the next book the same thing with miranda meeks she is painting a beautiful herald for us and we're going to save it for the next book and reveal it at a future time for this one i contacted ma magalie villanuev villeneuve i'm sorry that i'm saying is from france and she is wonderful magalie villeneuve i hope she's watching and can give me a thumbs up on that um so she has done some work previously for us in warbreaker where she did a beautiful rendition of the venna in the the stone uh soldiers garden um i asked her if she would be interested in painting one of these heralds or two of them and she said i only paint digitally and i was kind of like i really want my mughally to do one of these for us and so i dreamed up this crazy idea and i talked to howard and i said howard if i can get moggly to do digital versions of these would you want to paint our physical versions and he gave me the thumbs up we all got in contact with each other and um that's where we we uh go ahead and so what we have here is the harold paelia who is the herald of the truth watchers and kellek these are our front end papers you've probably seen them now you're holding the book kellock is in kind of the command position on this you open the book you see him right there mainly because he is the will shaper herald and his glyph is on the front of this book the book is purple the cover is somewhat purple we wanted to kind of keep that together there so those are the digital versions and tonight howard is here to reveal the physical version that he painted for us and talk a little bit about that so i'm going to give the floor to howard for a few minutes here all right thanks for having me here um it feels good to take off my mask i can give him mine let's see is that better okay great um i'm honored to be here tonight and talk a little bit about the art and at least this particular painting if you want to bring that in now that's great let's see if we can lean it up against that stool do you want to put it there all right okay i'll step off to the side so i thought i'd talk a little bit about the normal process of creating an illustration and uh just to quickly go over that and you're contacted by the an art director and you do some little thumbnail sketches and that's often the best part of of the process and you submit those to the art director and they um they pick one that they like and you develop that into a a more finished sketch and sometimes that's the best part of the process and then you take that to color and work out all the values and the colors and then you go through the process of actually executing the painting and there's a lot of steps and a lot of work involved on that and that's that's usually what you go through there's a lot of work before you actually get to the final painting well in this case i didn't have to do any of that work i had this incredible privilege really the honor of working with with isaac and and magaly to create this piece or really to receive the concept from magali and then be able to execute it in oils and you know the images that she created were so beautiful that i really wanted to be true to her her creation and there's there's some subtle changes in it but that was just um the result of interpreting it kind of reinterpreting her work and it's kind of like she designed this castle quarried the stone built it put up the foundation the timbers and went through all that work and at the end i got to walk up the stairs and put the flag on the highest you know tower and say look what i made but in reality she did an incredible amount of work for us to get to this point and i'll also quickly mention the frame by masterworks frames who does an incredible job uh making the frames for it when you as an artist often we will do studies of old masters work and when you do that it's really like walking in someone else's shoes you get to understand their sensibilities their visual cues their palate the way they render things and we don't do that as often with our contemporaries these days and so it was a real treat to do that with magali's work and and feel like i um i painted with different colors than i would normally choose to work with a different palette and different visual sensibilities and i learned a lot from doing that and i i had the chance to paint a couple other heralds and i wanted to do more but i didn't get to be selfish with them you know brandon and isaac rightfully wanted a lot of other artists to create heralds and bring their vision to them so i felt again lucky to be able to touch my hand to a couple more heralds so i think that's that's it let me hand this back to you isaac thank you howard so we have a we have a video from magali that she sent us talking about her process and working on this and we can play that hi i'm magdy vinov and i'm one of the illustrators who worked on the stormlight archive so i'm really happy this project is being revealed now and that i'm able to talk about it some more so to make things short there are two main reasons why i really did enjoy working on those two pieces the first reason probably was the freedom of creation i was given by brandon sanderson and isaac stewart from the dragon steel team they were really open to seeing what i would come up with as long as i would respect you know such things like um what the characters were supposed to be about what they represented and the symbols around them and all but starting from that i could really let my imagination went wild and it doesn't happen all the time you know when you are working on illustrations i'm more used to having really precise guidelines and precise assignments texts here it was more about pure creation and you know they really wanted to know what would be my ideas and i really want to thank them for that because it was really fun exciting and also challenging so yes it was a really great project the second reason was that for the first time ever i think in my career i gotta work kind of work directly with another illustrator and i think that's what seoul really sold the project to me was when isaac told me it would be a hardware lion well needless to say i've been following howard's work for years and i really do admire what he does and his paintings really speak to me so yeah when uh when i knew we would get to work together i was totally yeah i'm on board definitely and i also think it was really good and unusual idea that the dragon steel people had because to put things in a nutshell the deal what that i would first create designs for these two heralds and paint digital paintings final paintings for them and at the end how what would get to do an actual painting for those pieces and i've never seen that before and i really was curious to see how because you know our styles are a bit different so i was really curious and also a bit honored to to see uh howard's painting and when i saw the first one i was amazed and it was a really great moment for me and i was really surprised by how close uh it was to to my painting it was i really did love that so i hope you will as well and yeah thanks everyone and thank you the dragon steel team bye wonderful to work with and i hope that we'll be able to show you more things from her in the future if we go to the next image there we're just going to show you the a couple of close-ups of howard's uh howard's painting of uh muggles harold and then let's talk about the back end papers which were done by carla ortiz carla ortiz is known for magic cards and concept art from marvel among other things and she is fantastic she's a great artist i was looking for an opportunity to work with her and when the these heralds came up the herald's nail and chana we i i couldn't think of anybody else to have do this and luckily she said yes when we we contacted her about that let's uh she sent us a video and let's uh let's play that so we started talking about working together earlier this year i think this isaac who hit me up he's like hey um brandon would really like to work with you i already knew about you know the project because i've had friends of mine illustrator peers who've worked on it before and you know they sent me information on the characters on where it was going to be published it was going to be a special edition it kind of a big deal type of situation but that they also wanted it to be done in oils and to me that was one of those things was like it was a little nerve-wrecking um because i don't often work in oils for clients um i normally work digitally that's because with oils like oils just takes time for example to be able to photograph an oil painting well you there's only two times you can do it it can only happen when the painting is actually wet freshly painted um or about maybe depending on how thick you know you paint the you know maybe about two weeks a month maybe two months before you're able to varnish it and properly you know bring back the the vibrancy of the oils otherwise it just it it pictures flat it's horrible and everybody's like wondering like wait do you really know how to do this you're like yeah you do it's just it takes forever um but they understood uh i feel like isaac and brandon really both understood uh you know what it's like to work in oils they've worked done it before and so i felt confident you know moving forward with them on this first you know we started doing really solid sketches i i tried to make the sketches look as close as possible to the final as i could um especially working with oils you do not want like midway through the painting to be like hey actually about this section i don't know about it maybe change it and you're just crying cutting up the canvas and pieces no you can't do that so you really really want to make sure that you nail the you know the sketch that it's in the right direction and that it's clear as possible so everybody knows where we're going um once we got the okay for both characters then you know was able to start the project the funny part though was that as soon as we started you know getting ready for you know actually doing the big oil paintings that's around the same time as cobit 19 hit and really started getting serious out here and almost everything that could have gone wrong went wrong during that time and just both in life and like materials and just everything everything went crazy um but funny enough the paintings that come became kind of a bit of a sanctuary for me um the big scary world out there was horrible the oil painting and painting you know nail and tarana sharana i never got her full name so i'm so sorry i'm horrible please don't hate me so you know getting nailed and china to look just like the characters you know how brandon envisioned them like to have like shauna's like motherliness and kindness show through and to have nails like justice above all type of situation you know personality show through it was really important and it became almost like i wouldn't necessarily say obsession because that's not healthy but obsession but yeah it was it was really fantastic to have that you know it brought a lot us all is to be able to work on something that i know has loved by many many people um and it became kind of like a little temple type of situation they became my temple um and they were joy like it's it's again i don't often work on oils for you know clients but whenever i can it's always a joy much more when they're cool characters and i just hope fans like it that's about it that's all one can hope for right and you know that you get to do more because it's fun all right i think that's all i gotta say [Laughter] bye friends so carla was wonderful to work with on this she instinctively grasped the symbolism behind the characters and i think that she did a great job representing them we have a couple of close-up images that i want to show you of these mainly because i want to show how she interpreted the spring and so the first one here is on chana and she's painted shauna and when you see nail both very realistically but if you look at the way that she's done the spring she's done this in sort of a novel way where we've seen more literal interpretations now we're seeing an impressionistic interpretation of this that's thick paint on there i want to lick it it's been in my office for weeks and i will not lick it i promise incidentally if i ever write an autobiography i want it to be called i licked a van gogh and i hope that i'm not writing it from jail let's go to the next one so uh with nail the spread in this picture are more like splatters they're blue splatters very well placed brush splatters on the and i just love this that it's this impressionistic take on the spring and and it's it works really well in world because i think artists in world would also wonder how do how do i interpret this aspect of my world and that would be one way all right so next image i get the manuscript i read the whole thing i make notes on it on this one you can see where i'm starting to think about the redesign of the stormlight symbol trying to simplify it because that was on my mind at the time i've blurred out a lot of the manuscript here because i don't want to cause spoilers but also you'll see down in here there's a little map that i've drawn that will later show up on one of the nivani sketchbook pages i read the book and i start to map things out which sounds really funny but i map it out and if we go to the book map here i take every chapter in the book at least to the closest approximation because some of these change a little bit as it's edited and i put illustrations in this the parts that i feel they're going to augment the story the best i don't want to bunch up a bunch of illustrations at one point i want to spread them out i try to begin a part with an illustration if it's helpful a map is a good way to begin a part sometimes but once we get into part five when the climax starts my rule is is that i don't put anything in the middle of the climax that's going to stop the reading because that that's our that's our brandon avalanche at that point and i do not want to get in the way of that all right so let's uh go to the next page here so we are taught this is how we are starting the book i knew a lot of the action was going to take place in earth hero we hired ben mcsweeney we to do a picture of the atrium we've seen the pictures of the outside of urathiru we added that one from oathbringer because we felt like it was a good reminder of what had taken place in oathbringer and what does earth hero look like it's not a standard city we're going to need this throughout the book and the atrium is so that we can see what does the inside of earth hero look like let's give some more visual clues here i work with brandon also to know which are the next viewpoint icons because each sometimes there's new characters and so let's let's uh fill that out with uh viewpoint icons there's in this book we've had i i'm all over the place sorry tongue twister we've seen risen we've seen teravangin before it was well timed that they got their own viewpoint icons if we have that up and then there's always a new flashback icon and this provided a challenge to us because in this book we are seeing past from eshenai and venli who both have their own icons at this point and previously we would just do a um inverse image of the character yeah of their character icon and this in this case we combined them together and did an inverse and i feel like it brought out a really a nice combination there that works for the flashbacks that's up on the screen right now there's a few other new icons as well one that howard did that we wanted to put in oathbringer but we never found the place to do that and so that shows up in this book as well the next thing we do is an art log we're not going to spend a lot of time on this it's an excel spreadsheet cara is over here getting excited um it's a spreadsheet where i take that map that i drew out i type it out i send it to tour so that their layout artist can figure out where everything goes in the book let's go to uh next dan dos santos he did fashion plates for us we decided in this book that we wanted for the fashion plates to be doing singer fashion they have kind of risen to their own over the last three books and now they are getting their own fashion um do you have those up right now so this is a difficult thing because the parshandi the singers the listeners we've read a lot about them a lot there's been a lot of fan art but how do we interpret this in a way that's going to please everybody and the the answer is we can't please everybody but in the end i think this is a great interpretation of the of the singers in the end whatever is in your head is right for your story brandon is scripting this out for you we're providing concept art and you get to direct your version of the stormlight archive but i think that dan nailed this the biggest thing that i came to dan with on this was there needs to be some relatability to these characters i want the viewers to look at it and say i can relate with the the listeners i can relate with the singers last minute dan sent us a video and i have not watched it so this is going to be new for all of us um and i really appreciate dan sending this though he really wanted to be part of this he's been really busy with projects and he's just been great to work with as always [Music] hi everyone i'm dan desantis aka dando's the oil sworn i wish we could all be together for the release of rhythm of war but i guess this will have to suffice for now uh thank you all for being here isaac stewart the art director on this book asked me to say a few words about my pieces in the book which i'm really proud to be a part of again uh the two pieces i have in a rhythm of war are the ones you see here which i'm sure isaac will probably have in some sort of slideshow and they really kind of started uh they're continuing the idea of doing fashion plates that we had in the previous two volumes which i had also done and they were always conceived in black and white and they're meant to kind of show whatever race that's in the book in their just to help build up the world building and show their natural attire and slip it into the story somehow and these two pieces actually kind of spawned from this parchandi piece i did just for fun for myself i was working on a piece for isaac and lots of times when i work on a painting i kind of start to draw other unrelated things to it and so in the case of of this project i was doing a painting of khaled and i kind of re-listened to the first stormlight book and just had my headphones on listening to the audiobook and drawing all these scenes until i got to the scene i had to draw and in that time i just started sketching out what i thought a parshendy warrior would look like and that's what you see here and for me i was drawing it because it was one of the few aspects of the story that i really didn't have a clear vision of in my head that's not true there's actually quite a few things in the story that i feel like maybe i don't picture as clearly as as i'd like to and so by drawing it out i kind of start to explore well how would i make these things how would i make the red and black striations on a parshandy would it be really fine marble like striations or would it be coarser and could there be interesting patterns that help distinguish one person parchment from another so i was really fortunate when isaac asked me to do the fashion plates based on parchment again for the following books so i decided to do a female kind of in her life state and then you know a masculine and feminine one over here and even though they appear in black and white in the book i actually have the originals here to show you guys if you're interested you can start to see i actually conceive of them in color at least in in this case because i thought the color was so important for these characters hopefully you can see that here i don't know about the light so here we have the live state you can hear this one it's not totally complete yet i was still uncertain about the background and how i wanted to treat that and some things work in color that don't work in black and white so i decided to finish it off on the computer before i really decided what i wanted to do with it and then i'll go back and i'll probably finish them here but these are rather small for me but for book size and for black and white to kind of suffice like that and almost everything you see in the books i've painted you can see a little bit of war breaker up there traditionally in oil paints before it gets a little bit of work done in photoshop and then isaac takes over and makes it look beautiful in the book that hopefully you're holding today in your hands thanks guys i hope you enjoyed a little peek at the studio and some of the creation of the art for a rhythm of war enjoy your night thank you dan for uh sending that to to us and and thank you for not rick rolling us with it so um so dan's always great to work with and i hope to be able to have more fashion plates from him in future books so we are almost done here but let's highlight nivani sketchbook notebook pages in this these come from kelly harris and kelly harris has started doing the nevada's notebook pages for us in the last book replacing the the art that i did so there was a big jump in quality that i'm sure in between books navani had been practicing quite a bit and um kelly couldn't uh couldn't get us a video but she sent me a little note saying that she loves being a part of the stormlight books and she sends her gratitude to team dragon steel and also to all of the readers who are loving her art she really appreciates the the kind comments that everybody is giving these are a collaboration really between me and kelly when i read the book i actually thumbnail some of these things out and i have to lay it out because we later have to put women's script text in there so i do a little bit of layout i tell kelly this is where we need some things she does some concept art we go back and forth we show it to brandon and it we whittle it down into the pieces that we how we want them to be and we'll ju we'll just uh kind of scroll through the these here they're all in women's script so the the first one we have uh the the flying ships we have some things about capturing spread we have the crystal pillar room if we go to the next one we have a cool looking dagger and then some some cymatic pattern type things that we have been seeing throughout the books up to this point anyway we are very grateful to always have kelly on board now with these books with nivani's notebook pages and thank you kelly for lending your genius to this book lastly there's the maps and i'm just going to say i love putting together the maps because nas gets to kind of come out and annotate things and say all sorts of crazy snarky stuff and if it's over the top or too much that's my fault not brandon's he lets me kind of do some fun things with nas there i imagine him to have so so my kids are watching the new ducktales now and the scrooge mcduck i've been hearing and i'm like oh that scrooge mcduck is great and i found out that it's david tennant and i am a who is scottish right so and i'm a big doctor who fan so if you want to read the nas pages or the little notes in sort of a gruff scottish accent that's how i imagine them or a kind of gruff peter capaldi that's how i imagine it so one thing i do want to point out on the map of azir and emul as we've talked about tuckerizations a little bit and this year kara's grown her team quite quite a bit and so we added some tuckerizations to this map in the form of cities so if you go to the acknowledgements and see if you can match up some of those i do want to point out the rossendar and say he was somebody who helped us with the knights radiant quiz and i was very grateful for that help so his name is a little bit bigger on the map so that that's it for my presentation thank you for enjoying the book thank you for enjoying the art and for letting us do crazy things with these books that we wouldn't be able to do otherwise thank you very much actually my sister jane who runs uh lightweaver my charitable foundation she put together a thing i'm not exactly sure what even is it cause i haven't seen it yet but she does a lot of the work that we do for charity she kind of oversees that and so she put together a little thing for you guys and then i'll be back with some more readings for you hi i am jane horn director of the lightweaver foundation the lightweight foundation was founded in 2015 by brandon emily sanderson and since then has been able to contribute to many causes around the world one of our favorite projects during the holiday season is decorating a tree for the festival of trees program in the greater salt lake area these trees are auctioned off in all proceeds go directly to the intermountain healthcare foundation and primary children's hospital every year our tree is themed around the next brandon sanderson book to be released a unique feature of our tree includes an ornament that showcases a symbol that corresponds with the new release in the past fans have asked where they can get this sanderson-themed ornament we are happy to announce that for the first time these ornaments will be available to everyone this year's limited edition ornament features the new stormlight symbol designed by isaac stewart each ornament is hand blown cobalt blue glass with an etched symbol and date of release this collector's piece will be available while supplies last as each year new ornament design will be released each ornament is 15 and includes free global shipping all proceeds from your ornament purchase will go directly to the lightweaver foundation we would love to help you give back this holiday season as every donation will help further our mission and project outreach if you'd like to learn more about the lightweaver foundation or purchase an ornament please visit our website at lightweaver.org [Music] all right so we're going to do a couple more questions why don't you bring up two sheets for us if you would isabel these again are questions that people from the various bookstores submitted so let's see what do you think you'll do after the cosmere is finished i will die highly uh let's let's cross that bridge when we get to it i am focused completely on getting this done uh within a healthy human being's lifespan we have seen whit tell stories that others told incomplete versions of earlier in the book is this an in-world coincidence or is he aware of those stories being told um it is a little of both uh nothing mystical is handling here he doesn't automatically know if a story is being told but he keeps an eye on things shall we say um and finds out things that he shouldn't know all right nail seems to be able to sense lift stormlight even before she uses it after she eats the role is this an ability of him as a surge binder a herald or something external he's doing or using rafa after you decided that you didn't need to be cagey about cosmere references did the structure plot of the cosmere change um the structure plot of the overall cosmere is always being tweaked as i am getting further along this is less has to do with me uh being willing to put more of into the books for what the those who don't know what this is referencing is early in my career um i have been told i came from the 90s where continuity was a scary thing to a lot of people and television shows would not have cut a consistent continuity they'd be episodic and things and so i was worried that the story behind the story of the cosmere would overtake the story of a given book and i was really worried about that making people feel left out or things like that as i experimented i found that i'd been too too subtle people found the things they enjoyed it and indeed people weren't feeling left out by some of these things as long as i was careful with them so i i basically allowed myself to go a little further in each book with how much we've referenced the greater cosmere um this hasn't changed my outline for the cosmere but writing the books has all right so we'll get back to the uh the story time the last piece that i read a liar partner was written in 2007 and you may be aware of something else that happened to me in 2007 um and that was the wheel of time and this was one of the reasons why i put liar partner aside was because i wasn't satisfied with the book but i also knew that i had a lot of work to do and indeed we are entering now the era of my career i will call the brandon almost goes insane era this was when we built up the company quite a bit because i was working so much and indeed people ask me sometimes they're like are you worried you get burned out if i didn't get burned out during this period then i'm never going to get burned out because during this period uh from 2007 till about 2015 um i wrote and released three wheel of time books and two stormlight books and alloy of law and some other things um and this was this was kind of a crazy period mla were still living in a little town home um in provo that was really small did not have a finished basement i basically had a one-room basement and so i would go down there and work in the basement so that joel who was a toddler at the time couldn't find me but there was no heat down there and no insulation so i'd be heaped up with blankets around me in the winter typing away on parent scenes writing these books in this little town home it was kind of a crazy crazy time peter had to work in that uh environment as well after we hired him so sorry peter um peter does not respond well to cold so uh he has never forgotten those days in the basement he i i think really appreciated when he moved into an actual house with a finished basement but things were very very um busy during this time and indeed you got to feel a sense of it if you were following along the time because tor suddenly my books took off and were selling a lot of copies and so suddenly tor started releasing them faster instead of sitting on them for two years they're like why are we not releasing these brandon sanderson books we have and they would just start releasing them and so suddenly i went from having a two-year lead time on every book to as soon as i turn in a book like three months later the book is out uh almost right like we turned in rhythm of war like late september or no early september early september late august and it's already out so uh long big difference from the years where we would have two years of lead time um during this time how i chose projects changed again kind of dramatically because either i had something that i was contracted to write and so i had to choose that thing i couldn't suddenly decide i'm not going to write towers of midnight now no terrorism midnight needs to be written and i also started to kind of with my own time if i had time between projects stretch for things that were very different the way that i prevent burnout normally and this is i really developed during this time was to reach for different styles of writing to do something unlike anything i'd done before and so during this time you find me just kind of doing crazy things this actually started with alcatraz back when i was working on the misfortune books was the first time i needed a break i needed to do something different and as an aside for a while when mistborn was not selling very well but alcatraz was looking like it would sell very well i wondered if my career would take off as a middle grade writer and i would end up having that be my career that's the kind of potential career path for me is being a middle grade uh writing middle grade goofy fantasies like the alcatraz books that reversed as mistborn finally started taking off you can watch i've talked about that before what happened with miss born we just needed a good repackage and that second book to come out and suddenly that series really took off but there is an alternate dimension world where brandon is writing lots of goofy middle grade fantasies so actually what i want to read to you now is something along those lines that i wrote i was looking for a book that i didn't publish that was written in the early 2010s and the one i came up with was um the book i hate dragons which you may have heard of because i did it i started it as a little writing exercise on my blog and i had completely forgotten that after i had done that little writing exercise on my blog i've been like what if i wrote a few chapters of this um and so i wrote like four chapters of it um after what happened on the blog um and then a deadline came due uh for something more important and beyond the book was just kind of feeling too light and fluffy um and so i was not uh interested in finishing it but uh the premise of this is that there is a young man who smells really good to dragons and always gets used as bait and traps to trap dragons uh he has trapped a dragon uh by being bait and now he's wandering around that that night the first thing skip noticed was the beating of enormous wings he knew instantly what they meant after three or four hundred dragon attacks you learned to pick up on the signs he panicked of course he always panicked when a dragon approached fortunately he trained himself not to let that get in the way so while one primal a big lizard is going to eat me side of his brain started going in circles the other side went through a list was there water nearby no could he hide in a cellar with a door no could he obscure his scent somehow no he'd assumed himself well protected he doused himself with rose water before leaving the camp and his pockets were stuffed with garlic cloves people three cities away could probably smell the stench but he'd been certain he didn't smell like himself but that didn't always work the dragons would find him anyway particularly if he stayed in one place too long but he was moving he should have been safe safer at least the two sides of his brain collided back together and both told him to run he dashed forward hoping to find some kind of cave it was night but the moon was near full so he had a good view of the hills around him the grassy pleasant completely unbroken not a cave in sight hills the wing beats reading closer he couldn't outrun a dragon in flight he suddenly felt himself an idiot for having left the hunters at least there he'd have a chance someone to fight for him surprise the dragon end skip forced himself to slow i only have one chance he realized he slowed until he was merely strolling he stuffed his hand in his pocket beside the garlic and felt held his pack over his shoulder with the other he started whistling trying not to sound too forced it sure is a night good night for a stroll he said after a good whistle alone without anyone to protect or guard me what a nice breeze that is approaching from behind he felt a chill between his shoulder blades as if someone had stabbed him with an icicle the dragon was flying down toward him he would grab him in his claws tear him with its teeth it was so hard not to look the beats of the wings changed something massive and black flew past about 100 yards away red eyes watching him dragon eyes glowed the creature winged to the side and landed on a nearby rock it seemed wary skip looked at it and tried to feign surprise that tied his brain in knots and he ended up just staring that seemed to make the dragon even more worried its slender neck looked from side to side insufficient your acting is terrible the monster proclaimed so i've been told i smell no hunters where are they skip resisted the urge to exhale and relief the other dragon had assumed he was bait it had actually worked uh hunters skip said trying to sound nervous i don't know what you mean you'd have me believe you're out here alone sure am in dragon territory oh this is dragon territory at night my how the time has passed i didn't notice i realized that humans are often oblivious but this seems incredible even for one of you is it that obvious yes nobody is so stupid i wouldn't bet on that dragon leaned forward on his rock looking down skip stood nervously um i guess you can go now skip said what about the hunters you've figured out what we're doing skip said so we can't surprise you you might as well fly away we'll never kill you this way i want to see where you've hidden them don't be foolish do you have any idea how long it takes to dig in the grass and hide 50 armed soldiers if they climb out now it'll be hours getting them back in for the next dragon the dragon's eyes narrowed further and he leaned forward on his hilltop despite the moonlight it was difficult to made out make out much regarding him black on black scales that shone softly red eyes something was odd though skip couldn't put his finger on it i can't let your trap remain here the dragon said my brother is flying in these parts he might fall into it in fact a large number of my kin have gone missing in the last few weeks we have been told specifically to watch for a group of hunters in the area you haven't seen my brother have you can't say that i have what's his name heracle darker marco bacalocolu the word was unlike any that skip had heard there were sounds in it unnatural ones unexpected ones like getting a teddy bear filled with razor blades for your birthday hearing the name made skip's ears want to rebel and maybe take a turn at smelling things instead nope never heard of him we certainly didn't kill him earlier today i hope i don't care how many hunters you have little man you have just sealed your fate i bring you death this night these those words will be the last that what hey wait call your hunter's little man i will best them no no really wait just realize what's wrong you don't look maddened by my scent your scent why should i care about that but how did you find me i saw you little man walking draconic lands is asking to be devoured and so while i'm somewhat full from a tax man i ate earlier i decided to come down and make a feast of you it's the principle of the matter really but you smell nothing i can't smell inhaled some acidic smoke as a dragon lean burst burn my nostrils fiercely oh skip thought how wonderful a dragon who wouldn't upon smelling him get driven near insane it was amazing incredible and actually ironic for it seemed that this was the dragon who at long last would end up eating him so let's do two more of those questions two more sheets of questions all right first one is i am asked to wish happy birthday to tyler happy birthday tyler i hope that you're watching or if you're not you can come see this another time and get birthday wishes and to anyone else whose birthday happens to be now or around this time what's the longest amount of time in one sitting you've spent entirely writing this series uh it was probably the day i spent finishing rhythm of war which was about a year ago a little more a little less than a year ago you can find it in my twitter feed and my facebook feed where i said we're going to finish this book today and my family supported me and i went downstairs and i rode all day uh it was like 12 or 13 hours i think something like that so there you go what culture inspired the horn eaters so i don't usually use a single culture for any of my inspirations i like to uh mix a bunch of things together and some will be real world cultures and others will not be uh you can probably pick out the um the polynesian influences as well as the russian influences so they're kind of like siberian polynesians um but really the thing that uh inspired them the the polynesians part came from the language i i'm fascinated with languages and one of the cool things about the hawaiian language in particular which was the inspiration here is that because there are so many fewer sounds the words get extra long and that's why a lot of the words in hawaiian are so long compared to some other languages because uh they repeat sounds more often and they're just by simple math you end up needing longer words and i like how poetic the hawaiian language sounds and things like that so that's obviously one inspiration but a big inspiration for them was the original idea of their myths the ones that rock shares and talks about and their interaction with the spread i wanted a um a race um a culture on roshar that had both its roots in human culture and in listener culture uh horn eaters are human uh and listener hybrids like the um like the herdasians are um and whose cultural roots went back to both cultures and it built something new out of them so that's the primary inspiration which is your favorite somewhat lesser known fantasy series um so every time i'm asked for favorites it's a little hard for me to pick out because um you know my favorites change based on the times and sometimes uh what is lesser known also changes based on time like when i was growing up anne mccaffrey was the big best seller but i don't know if dragon rider supern is commonly read anymore and so is that lesser known is it not um i usually um uh point to daniel abraham's uh long pre long price quartet which are fantastic lesser known uh very short epic fantasies with an awesome magic system uh if you don't know who daniel abraham is he is one half of the author that writes the expanse under a pseudonym with ty frank i believe is the other one uh george rr martin's uh assistant and so give that one a look it is quite good um so um why don't we do two more of those and that'll end the questions for tonight um sorry if i didn't get to your question we've seen that metal borne siblings can end up with different powers what about metal born twins can happen uh most likely they will have the same power were there ever characters you've written that got surprising reaction from readers yes and you can go get another one because this will be fast the most surprising reaction i get is always on the side characters i don't expect anyone to pay any attention to things like how people will sometimes latch onto like the obvious example is the stick but other side characters and little things like that um like when i was writing yolb in um the first stormlight book i was surprised by how affectionate people were for y'all um and so that's why he has a cameo and something else i've done to let you get an update on where y'all did so let's do one more set of these how do you balance creating new and wonderful series while continuing to develop the worlds you already created actually let's do that one next because that'll segue me into the uh next thing out of all the characters you created which one do you uh most personify with i'm not sure if personified is the right term to identify it might be what they're looking for maybe it's the right use i'm not sure if that's another use of personify so um i would say that it it is the uh character i'm writing right now whoever i'm writing at the moment is the one i have to identify with the most i shamelessly stole that answer from robert jordan it's the way he answered this question uh but really i put a bit of me into every character i write every character is a balance between me and not me um in the stormlight arcade in particular i often point at yasna is the one i think is most like me um but that just depends on what how i'm feeling at the moment interestingly there's a thing that yasna says in this book that my beta readers were all like ah this is like cliched thing for an atheist to say and i'm like no no that's my answer to the question brandon's answer um overruled because i was having yasna speak from my own it wasn't me looking for the atheist answer it was me looking for how i would answer brandon sanderson uh it's justin's little thing that she talks about with hope in the book uh so um let's go back to this one how do you balance creating new and wonderful series while continuing to develop the worlds you already created thank you for adding the wonderful in there whoever asked this uh and isabel thank you so much you we leveled up a lot when we started having isabelle write out questions instead of me and she does a wonderful job with that so the balance gets into this whole question right how do i decide we've kind of entered into the modern era now talking about how i choose now because now is the time where i've started to really realize hey um if i want to finish the cosmere by the time i'm in my 70s i need to be focused i need to maybe stop letting myself deviate quite as often which has been kind of a harsh realization for me because throughout the rest of my career up until like the last five years i just always thought ah you know i'll write whatever strikes me when the time strikes me and that's how i write that's what i want to do and at this point i kind of hit a tipping point where i realized wanting to finish the stormlight archive and the cosmere is more important to me than the freedom of just being able to write whatever i want whenever i want um and this is a thing i gave up when i decided to become published right i gave up a bit of that that the moment i signed the contract for a series i gave up some of that freedom and i did it eyes open knowing that it is something i wanted to do a lot of times in life we want to have done things i wanted to have written great a great trilogy like mistborn i want to have finished something as uh as powerful and as uh weighty and hopefully as epic as the stormlight archive these are things i goals i want to have done and more and more i want to align the momentary parts of my life with the things that i want to have done in the future if that makes any sense and this is starting to change a little bit the way that i approach uh letting myself be distracted uh you'll notice that um my upcoming books are um there are no secrets among those i am finishing wax and wayne and and the the skyward series and then finishing the first arc of the stormlight archive um and this is me just understanding that um i don't have to really um amp it up but i do have to be consistently on target and this kind of brings me kind of to the end i do have one more reading for you but as i was thinking about opportunity cost the thing that really settled in my mind was this idea of what do i want to have done rather than what do i want to do now um and i started to look at each of these stories i've written and it's interesting in that each story that i write is almost like a picture a snapshot of who i am at the time sometimes i get questions from writers one of these happened on stream recently where they say what do i do if i'm such a perfectionist that i can't finish revising a story or i can't bear to let a story out there and the answer at least for me to this question is to realize the stories are pictures of you the stories both cannot be perfect and are already perfect at the same time uh when you are done with them when that picture of what you can do as a writer is finished at that time then it's time to let go of that book and say here it is this is the picture of me i have zits right now because i'm a teenager or whatever and you know this is the prom picture who cares this is who i am right now uh you know the um the books that i've read to you particularly those early ones a little bit rough but they were pictures of a developing artist and for me part of their value is that snapshot of who i was at the time and when it comes to this opportunity cost i think that sometimes at least in picking books what i'm not acknowledging is that whatever book i pick is actually going to develop to be a picture of who i am right now and then so in some ways it doesn't really matter and so i kind of combine those two things it doesn't really matter but also i want to have done things and i put those together and that is how these days i am picking which books i work on and uh to the that end i want to share one more thing with you now i wasn't going to read this but i was thinking about this um this whole year we've gone through and it's not over yet right still wearing masks my poor children still don't know if school is going to go online or not in the imminent future and my my son joel is struggling through his first year of junior high with half the time it being uh home and half the time it being there and uh it has just been a really rough year for a lot of people and so i thought i'm going to go ahead and read the thing that i sent to my my company i said you guys what do you think and they're like well it does kind of spoil some things but maybe it's time so i'm actually going to read to you from the sequel to sixth of the dusk which takes place during the space age of the cosmere uh and so um there are going to be some fun things in here that you're not going to get to see in depth for a while so if you are worried about space age of the cosmere being spoiled for you i might recommend you know waiting for 15 years before you read this but i'm going to do a short reading so this is something i've been perpetually working on for a few years and this is not yet canon because i haven't released it uh so it's entirely possible that i'll change some of this but for now this is from um the sequel to six of the dust which i haven't named it's not seventh of the dusk uh if you want to read the original story it is in arcanum bounded or you can get the ebook i think still is a standalone from our store or from any ebook stores that you want but the cheaper way is arcanum unbounded because you'll get all the cosmere stories short stories so um here we go the ones above were human dust could imagine them as strange and terrible creatures full with faces full of fangs artists renditions of them from the broadsheets tended to err on the side of mystery showing beings with dark pits where faces should be as if representing the darkness of space itself confined somehow into their strange outfits and helmets truth was nobody had known until this moment when attempting to inspire trust the two aliens from another world retracted their helmets and displayed shockingly human features dusk stepped forward in the observation chamber which overlooked the launching landing pad the chamber was supposed to be secret with reflective glass on the outside but dusk had never trusted that to hide him the ones above had machines that could sense life and he suspected they could see him or at least his aviar regardless of the barrier he'd have preferred to be out on the landing platform with the diplomats but he supposed he should be thankful even that they even let him attend there are many among the politicians in company leadership who were baffled by vathi's continued reliance on him the government officials in the room with him gasped as they saw the faces of the aliens one male one female it seemed with pale skin that looked like it had never seen the sun perhaps it hadn't considering they lived out in the emptiness between planets their helmets retracted automatically but left stylized metal portions covering the sides of the head reaching out and covering the cheeks from the look of the delicate metal ribbed like ripples of waves those portions didn't seem like ornament or armor more like ornament on his shoulder sex squawked softly dust glanced at the jet black aviar then looked around the room seeking signs of his corpse the bird can show him glimpses of the future revealing his visions his own dead body ways he could or perhaps should have died it took him a moment to spot the death it was out on the launch pad one of the two aliens stood with her foot on dust's skull the face smoldering as if burned by some terrible alien weapon what did it mean sex visions had been off ever since that event five years ago when the alien device had been activated on pachi once seeing the courts would corpse would have weren't warned dusk of immediate danger a biting insect with deadly venom or a hidden predator now the warnings often felt more abstract the ones above were unlikely to kill him today no matter what he did but that did not mean they were safe or trustworthy toward a new era of prosperity one of them said out in the launch pad extending a hand of athe who stood at the head of the diplomats between our peoples and yours president she took the hand though dusk personally would rather have handled a deadly asp it seemed worse to him somehow to know that the ones above were human an alien monster with features like something that emerged from the deepest part of the ocean was somehow more knowable than these smiling humans familiar features should not cover such alien motives and ideas it was as wrong as an aviar that could not fly to prosperity vati said her voice was audible to him as if she were standing at beside him it emerged from the speakers on the wall devices developed using alien technology it is good the second alien said speaking the language of the home isles as easily as if she had been born to it you are finally listening to reason our masters do not have infinite patience we are accustomed to impatient masters vathi said voice smooth and confident we have survived their tests for millennia the male laughed your masters the gods who are islands just be ready to accept our installation when we return yes the female said no masks no deception she tapped the side of her head and her helmet extended again obscuring her features the male did the same and together they left climbing aboard their sleek flying machine which is in the shape of a triangle with with pointed toward the sky it soon took off streaking toward the air without a sound its ability to land and take off baffled explanation the only thing the dust people knew about the process was that the ones above it requested the launch pad may be be made entirely out of steel the smaller ship would supposedly meet with a larger one that was in orbit around the planet ship larger than even the greatest of the steam-powered behemoths that dusk's people had used here on first of the sun dusk had only just been getting used to those creations but now he had to accust himself to something new the even calm light of electric lights the hum of a fan powered by alien energy the ones above had technology so advanced so incredible that dusk and his people might as well have been traveling by canoe like their ancestors they were far closer to those days than they were to sailing the stars like these aliens as soon as the alien ship disappeared in the end of the sky the generals and company officials began chatting in animated ways it was their favorite thing talking like aviar who'd come home to roost by the light of the evening sun ear to tell all the others about the worms they had eaten sec pulled close to his hand then packed at the band that kept his dark hair and a tail she wanted to hide though she was no chick capable of snuggling in his hair as she once had sec was as big as his head though he is comfortable and accustomed to her weight and he wore a shoulder pad that her claws could grip without hurting him he lifted his hand and cripped his index feeder in finger inviting her to stretch out at her neck for scratching she did so but he made a wrong move and she squawked at him then pecked his finger in annoyance she was grouchy as usual he felt the same way honestly matthew had said it was because city life didn't agree with him but dusk blamed a different source it had been two years since they lost lost coke really to disease without that colorful buffoon around to chatter and stick his beak into trouble the two of them had grown old and surly second nearly died from the same disease and then alien medicine from the ones above the terrible aviar plague same as those that had occasionally ravaged the population in the past have been smothered in weeks gone wiped out zazi is tying a double hitch dusk ignored the generals from their chattering eventually coking sec into a head scratch as they waited everything about this new life in the modern city full of machines and people with clothing as colorful as any plumage seems so sanitized not clean steam machines weren't clean but fabricated deliberate confined this room with its smooth woods and steel beams was an example here nature was restricted to an armrest where even the grain of the wood was oriented to be aesthetically pleasing soon with the coming of the ones and above and their ways he doubted there would be any wilderness left on the planet parks per half perhaps preserves but you couldn't put wilderness in a box no more than you could capture the wind you could enclose the air but it wasn't the same thing soon the door opened and vathi herself entered her avr on her shoulder mafia had risen high these these last few years president of the company one of the most powerful politicians in the city she wore a colorful striped skirt of an old pattern and a business-like blouse and jacket as always she tried through everything she did dress included to embrace a meeting of old ways in new he wasn't sure you could capture tradition by putting its trappings on a skirt any more than you could box the wind but he appreciated the effort well bathy said to the group of officials we've got three months but they're not going to stand any further delays thoughts everyone had an idea ways to stall further plans to feign ignorance of the deadline or to plausibly pretend that something had gone wrong with the avr delivery silly little plans the ones above would not be delayed this time and they would not simply trade for birds upon the whims of the whole home islanders the aliens intended to put a production plant right on one of the outer aisles and there began raising and shipping their own avr maybe we could resist somehow said thule company strategist who had a colorful aviar of cokerly's same breed we could fake a coup and overthrow the government force the ones above to deal with a new organization reset the talks a bold idea far more radical than the others and if they simply just decide simply to take us over said general second of saplings wrapping his hand on a stack of papers that he held in his other hand you could see the you should see these projections we can't fight them if the mathematicians are right the orbital ships could reduce our granite cities to rubble with a casual shot or two the ones above are feeling bored they could wipe us out in a dozen more interesting ways like shooting into the ocean so waves wash away our infrastructure they won't attack bathy said six years or more and they've suffered underlays with nothing more than threats there are rules out there in space that prevent them from simply conquering us they've already conquered us thus said softly strange how quickly the others quieted when he spoke they complained about his presence in these meetings they thought him a wild man lacking social graces they claimed to hate how he'd watched them refusing to engage in their conversation but when he spoke they listened words had their own economics as sure as gold did the ones in short supply were the ones that secretly everyone wanted dusk bathy said what did you say we are conquered he said turning from the window to regard her he cared not for the others but she didn't just grow quiet when she spoke when he spoke she listened the plague that took cokerly how long did they sit in their ship up there watching as our avr died they didn't ha have the medicine on hand said third of waves the company officer of medical industry a squat man with a bright red avr that let him see colors invisible to everyone else they had to wait to fetch it dusk remained quiet you imply bathy said that they deliberately delayed giving us the medicine until aviar had died what proof do you have the darkout last month das said the ones above were quick to share their more common technologies lights that burned cold and true fans to circulate air in the muggy home isle summers ships that could move at several times the speed of the steam-powered ones but all these ran on power sources supplied from above and those power sources deactivated if opened their fish farms were a boom to our open oceans said the company's secretary of supply but without the nutrients sold by the ones above we wouldn't be able to keep the farms running the medicine is invaluable said third of waves infinite mortality has plummeted literally thousands of our people live because of the what what the ones above have traded us when they were late with the power shipment last month said the city slowed to a crawl and we know that was intentional from the accidentally leaked comments they wanted to reinforce their uh to us their power they will do it again everyone fell silent thinking as he wished they'd do more often sex squawked again and thus glanced at the launch pad his corpse was still out there laying where the ones above left had left burned and withered show in the other alien vathy said to the guards the two men at the door with security avr on the shoulders and wearing feathers on their military caps stepped out they returned shortly with an incredibly strange figure the other aliens wore uniforms and helmets unfamiliar clothing but still recognizable this creature stood seven feet tall and was encased entirely in steel armor of a futuristic cast smooth and bright with a soft violet blue glowing at the joints the element glowed at the front with a slit light visor and an arcane symbol reminding dust vaguely of a bird in flight etched the front of the breastplate the ground shook between these being steps as it entered the room that armor it was surreal like interlocking plates that somehow produced no visible seam just layered pieces of metal covering everything from fingers to neck obviously air tight with a rounded cast to it the outman had a outfit had stiff iron hoses connecting helmet and armor the other aliens might have looked human but dusk was certain this alien was something frightful it was too tall too imposing to be a simple human perhaps he was not looking at a man at all but instead a machine that spoke as one you did not tell them you had met me the alien said projecting a male voice from speakers at the front of the helmet the voice had an unnatural cast to it not an accent like someone from a backwater aisle but a kind of unnatural heir no bathy said but you were right they ignored each of my proposals and acted as if the deal were already done they intend to set up their own facility on one of the islands you have only one gem with which to bargain people of the isles the aliens said you cannot withhold it you can merely determine to whom you offer it if you do not accept my protection you will become a vassal to these ones above your planet will become a farming station like many others and tend to defeat their expanse expansion efforts your birds will be stripped from you the moment it becomes possible to do so and you offer something better bathy asked my people will give you back one of a hundred birds born the armored figure said and will allow you to fight alongside us if you wish to gain status now elevation one in a hundred second of sapling said the outburst unsettling his gray and brown aviar robbery choose cooperation slavery or death and if i choose not to be bullied sapling snapped reaching to his side perhaps unconsciously for the repeating pistol he carried in a holster the alien thrust out his armored hand and smoke or missed coalesced there out of nowhere it formed into a gun longer than a pistol shorter than rifle wicked in shape with flowing metal along the sides like wings it was the sapling's pistol what a shadowy deep beast of the oceans might be to a minnow the alien races of their hands snapping a small box perhaps a power supply into the side of the rifle causing it to glow ominously tell me president the alien said to vathi what are your local laws regarding challenges to my life do i have legal justification to shoot this man no fathy said firm the way voice was audibly shaken you may not i do not play games the alien said i will not dance with words like the others do you accept my offer or you will not if you do not you join them and i will have legal right to consider you my enemies the room remains still sapling carefully edging his hand away from his sidearm i do not envy your decision the armored alien said you've been thrust into a conflict you do not understand but like a child who has found himself in the middle of a war zone you will have to decide which direction to run i will return in one month local time the colored portion of the creature's armor started glow more brightly a sky blue or a sky a deep violet that seemed far too inviting color to come from this strange being he lifted the air a few inches then finally pulled the power pack from his gun dismissing the weapon to vanish in a puff of mist he left without further word gliding back out the hallway past the guards who stepped away and didn't impede him this alien arrived without a ship but didn't seem to need one to travel the stars he had flown down out of the sky under the power of they assumed his strange and magnificent armor once he had gone the two guards took up positions at the door sheepishly holding their rifles they knew as everyone in the room knew that no guard would stop a creature like that one if he decided to kill bathy pulled a chair over the room's small table then sat down in a slumping posture her avr crawling anxiously across her back from one shoulder to the other this is it she whispered this is our fate caught between the ocean wave and the breaking stone this job had weathered her dusk missed the woman who had been so full of life and opticism for the new advances of the future and for the few new advances of the future unfortunately she was right so there was no sense in offering meaningless aphorisms besides she had not asked the question so he did not respond sec chirped and a body appeared on the table in front of vathi dusk frowned then that frown deepened because the corpse was not his never in all his time bonded to sac had she shown him anything other than his own corpse even during that dangerous time years ago when her abilities had grown erratic even then she'd shown dusk his own body just many copies of it he stepped across the room and vathi looked up at him seeming relieved as if she'd expected him to comfort her she frowned then when he mostly ignored her to look down on the body in the table female very old long hair having gone white the corpse went and wore an unfamiliar uniform after the cut of the ones above community commendations on the breast pocket but in another language it's her he thought studying the aged face it's vathy some 40 years in the future dead and dressed for a funeral dusk the living vathyast what do you see corpse dust said causing some of the others in the room to murmur they were uncomfortable with sex power which was unique among avr that's wonderfully descriptive dusk vathy said one might think that after five years you might learn to answer with more than one word when someone talks to you he grunted walking around the vision of the corpse the dead woman held something in her hands what was it corpse he said then moved to the living bathing side then met the living bathy's eyes yours mind fathy said rising she glanced at sec who huddled on dusk's shoulder feathers pulled tight why has he ever done this before dust shook his head rounding the corpse the body wears a uniform one of theirs the ones above there are symbols on some of the patches and awards it appears as if prepared for barrier let's see i cannot read the alien writing one of the generals scrambled to get in paper and pen after handing it over the general backed away regarding the table as one might a nightmare that was ready to pounce thus copied the letters on the uniform's most prominent patch bathy read the secretary's supply colonial governor of the occupied planet first of the sun all eyes in the room turned toward vathi all but dusks he knew what she looked like so he kept writing the nudge the secretary of supply again looks like a commendation from valor the woman replied for putting down what was called the rebellion of o5 the others are similar dusk nodded so if this was a glimpse of the future it was what vathi would do when she died or it would be when she died a servant of the ones above apparently having turned his people's military against rebels who didn't agree well that made sense he nodded to himself and tried to get a closer look at what the corpse was holding a small disc or coin of some sort with a drawing on it dusk you don't seem as horrified as you should be the living vathy said to him why would i be horrified he said this makes sense it's what you would do probably what you will do i'm no traitor she said he didn't reply it hadn't been a question even if it was an incorrect statement leave us she said to the others please we can just discuss this prophecy later i need to confer with the trapper they didn't like it they never liked it when vappy listened to him perhaps they'd understand if they listened more themselves still they filed out at the request leaving two humans and two avr alone father's bird maris hunched down and raised her wings while staring at the table seemed that she could sense what sec was doing curious dusk vathy said why do you think i'd do these things progress it is your way progress is not worth the blood of my people progress will come anyway dust said the dusk has passed this is the night you will presu presume to find a new dawn and to do what you and do what you must to guide us there he looked at her then tried to smile there is a wisdom to that vathi is what you taught me many years ago she wrapped her arms around herself staring at the table must it be no i am not dead am i she shook her head i want a way out dusk a way to fight back against them or something way to control our own destiny they're both so confident that they own us what i wouldn't give to be able to surprise them you're holding something dust said leaning down a coin large one maybe a medallion not money engraved with a man on a canoe wearing feathers and holding a loft a board with wave patterns on it some kind of trapper tenth the finder she said he frowned seriously dusk he's one of the most famous explorers and trappers who ever lived my trainer didn't tell me of him you could read a book or something the past is important if it was important my trainer would have told me about it so this man must not be important matthew rolled her eyes he was the first man to explore patchy then he likely died quickly dust said nodding means he must not have known much first of all explorers were stupid not because of themselves they just didn't have experience yet he looked to her cocking an eyebrow he vanished she admitted on a second trip there but we still used some of his exploration routes as shipping channels to reach the pantheon islands he was important dust didn't reply because why would he contradict her she liked believing this and she always found seemed fond of the stories of old trappers she fans herself herself an amateur one even still despite the fact that she had been one of the ones who ended the entire profession as dusk was looking at the medallion the vision finally vanished sec chirped as if apologetic when dusk looked at her the books bird's eyes were drooping as if she were exhausted i'm going to investigate stepping down fathy said a fake coup is silly but if i simply quit it could cause political unrest that justifies giving us an excuse to delay negotiations plus it will remove me from a position where i can do damage thus nodded then felt himself growing uncomfortable for once he found that he couldn't remain silent he looked at her another will do worse fathee another will cause more death you are better than another are you sure no how could he how could he be he could not see the future like set could still he crouched down beside vathi's seat then held his hand toward her she clasped it then held tight he nodded to her you're stronger than anyone i know he said but you're just one person i learned five years ago that sometimes one person cannot stand before the tide then there's no hope of course there is we must become more than one we must find allies allies vathi two peoples have come to bully us to demand that we give up our resources there must be others perhaps those who are weak like we are with whom together we might be strong trapper cannot fight a shadow alone but a battleship with a full crew that is something else how would we find anyone else dusk the ones above have forbidden us from leaving the planet we're decades well maybe centuries away from building flying machines i will go into the darkness he said she looked into his eyes and though she'd objected each other time he suggested this today she said nothing at times she had become like him and he like her she made him believe that they could adapt to the future he just needed to make her believe that he could help we sent entire crews into the darkness desk she said said scientists soldiers no trappers well no i will go he said i will find help and if you fail then i will die he said like your explorer man tempt the finder you called him dust touched his forehead then pressed his fingers finger against hers i gave up patchy for the planet vathi but i will not give up the planet to those men from the stars no matter how brilliant their weapons are amazing their wonders i will gather you an expedition some guards a crew she met his eyes you're going to insist on going alone aren't you he nodded fool man a full man he did not respond because she might be right but he was going to go anyway and there we go so when will i finish that who knows uh but it is one of the projects on my radar is establishing the things that i want to have done so we can look forward that to that in the future for now i'm gonna go home and instead of going out on tour for three weeks i'm gonna keep writing thank you guys for reading i hope you enjoy rhythm of war i hope you've enjoyed being with us that tonight and i hope to provide many many more books for you in the future [Applause] you

Channel: Brandon Sanderson

Views: 110,120

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Id: wQhjxhl_eDQ

Length: 174min 35sec (10475 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 18 2020