[Firefight Tour] Seattle 1/07

[karaokeang]

I am here at the library event. I will try to record as much as possible.

[karaokeang]

I recorded the signing. Where is a good site to upload it?

[WeiryWriter]

I recorded the signing. Where is a good site to upload it?

 

Soundcloud is usually a good place.  How long is the recording though?

 

Edit: I'm also splitting this off since it is a different signing.

 

Also squirenonny on tumblr posted a recording of the q&a.

Edited January 8, 2015 by WeiryWriter

[Argent]

I recorded the signing. Where is a good site to upload it?

 

I don't like Soundcloud because of how (poorly) it handles large / long recordings. I stick mine in the cloud, Google Drive for example, and let people download it if they want to listen and / or transcribe. Not as convenient as a web player, but it allows me to keep the thing in a single file.

[WeiryWriter]

Okay I did a really rough transcription of the general q&a audio but the tumblr audio player is stupid so I haven't been able to fix a lot of stuff.  I also left out a lot of the filler where he is distributing swag and stuff that we know (or non-answers)

 

[i’m actually a video game developer...]

B: Oh cool.

 

{and the one thing that was running through my mind after reading the Stormlight Archive was “I want to make that” [...] video games[...]}

B: Excellent question. So, other media. I like video games a lot. I remember (you’re going to get a lot of stories tonight, this is what happens, I’m a storyteller) I was 11 years old, my father shipped me off to visit my uncle for the first time on my own. Got put on an airplane and everything, went to Utah from Nebraska. My father gave me two hundreds, two one hundred dollar bills, he said “Pay for your food” and things like this. (You’re laughing you know what happens) I just got my uncle to pay for everything and at the end of it my conscience had gotten to me and I said “Uncle [???] my dad gave me money, I should give this to you to pay for the food”. He just laughed and said “No you’re not going to do that. We’re going to the mall right now. We’re going to spend that money because if you don’t your dad will take it back” And I bought a Nintendo, original NES, with my two hundred dollars at KB Toys. And I came back with it and my dad said “Where did you get that?”

B: I love video games and I want to be involved, some of you may have noticed I did these novellas for Infinity Blade, which you can read online but if you don’t play the games they won’t make any sense. I’m just going to warn you right there. We have sold the rights to Mistborn but we have entered some development problems, the video game industry is almost as bad as the movie industry when it comes to delays. Studios fall through, get divided, things like this. I’m still hoping but the deal was I got to write the story and all the dialogue for the video game. It’s going to be (we are going to do it) an action RPG, the model I told them I wanted to use was Infamous, which was one of my favorites from lately, in the Mistborn world. If we can get that working then I bet we can get a Stormlight book turned into a video game.

B: As movies go, movies are even harder. I was on the phone with movie producers right before I came here. I got a phone call, and we’re doing a lot of that, a lot of discussion, we’ve sold a lot of rights, we’ve seen a lot of [...] So right now we have Legion, Emperor’s Soul, Mistborn, and Steelheart all have significant motion but far from actually done. And the Wheel of Time is kind of off-again, on-again, off-again, on-again with adaptations.

I want to know what process you go through for building vocabulary. Also, do you use a thesaurus?

B: My vocabulary development comes through reading other people’s books and seeing what cool words they use and writing them down. And I can often pinpoint who I learned which word from. Like miasma I learned from Anne McCaffrey. Just seeing the words they use and looking them up when i don’t know them. Do I use a thesaurus? I do use a thesaurus but only to come up with a word I know I should be using. There’s two times I use it. One, when I come to a word and I know there’s a word there but I don’t know what it is yet. The other time I use a thesaurus, which is really useful, is when I’m naming something. Like when I was naming the Reckoners, I need a cool word for this team. One that Marvel or DC hasn’t used yet *fake exasperated* They used everything *end fake exasperated* So I may use a thesaurus, but using a thesaurus is dangerous. It’s a good tool but it’s a dangerous tool for a writer. Because you don’t want to use a word because it sounds cool, usually you want to use the right word. That can be difficult to balance.

[wants to ask a question but is worried about spoilers] We hear a lot in The Final Empire about various titles and such in the Steel Ministry. Can you give a little as to their actual structure and what they do?

B: Yeah I can talk about this.

[They only thing you can’t is the ranks]

B: So the Steel Ministry, in the Mistborn books. The interesting thing I considered when I was writing was “What is the purpose of the priesthood when god is there in the palace and everyone knows it? And if you disobey you just get your head cut off.” So I made the Steel Ministry more government, like the post office is run by priests. A lot of what priests do is witness official business, take your money in doing so and give you a stamp that “Yes I witnessed this” but they also run all the public works. It’s not like they’re cleaning the sewers themselves but overseeing the sewers, overseeing engineers, most of the engineers who designed the cities would be obligators.

B: Which by the way you named didn’t you? There he is [???] who was in my writing group for many years. We were driving to writing group once and I wanted a cool word for a priest, because I was just using priests in the original version of Mistborn. I’m like “I need a great word” and he-- How did you come up with that word?

You really want to know?

B: Yeah.

Thesaurus.

B: So you can congratulate [Nate?] for coming up with obligator, and was it you that came up with Conventicle or was that Peter? It was Peter.

[question about Brandon’s outlining process]

B: Oh good question… You picked the hardest one to outline, by far. Normally the outlining process for me, I sit down and write Plot, Setting, Character in a new sheet. [...] And then I put all the things that I have been thinking in my head for a while, that I’ve been brainstorming with friends or-- Every book that I write I spent a long time planning it out, it’s when ideas connect together that you know you have a great book. One idea is not enough, multiple ideas that influence each other in cool ways is a book to me. So I write all this down and start looking for structure and what are people’s plots. Now the way I outline I’m goal-based. Say I want to have an interesting relationship between these two characters, how can I achieve that? What is the result at the end and what are the steps to getting there? [...] Somebody wants to learn to use the magic, what’s my end goal, what are my steps to get there, what cool scenes will there be. Those are all separate in my outline, it’s not like in my outline there’s “Chapter one: this, this, this, and this”. It’s Goal and how to achieve, Goal and how to achieve, Goal and how to achieve.

B: Now the Stormlight Archives is a strange beast, it is plotted as ten books, each focusing on a character, and for that what I did was sit down and lay out more in prose form by vision for the whole series and then I wrote a paragraph for each book. Then I did what I just told you for the first book, then I wrote the first book. Then I went back and did a bigger, much more detailed outline for the rest of the series. The interesting thing about the Stormlight books is that I actually plot each one like I plot a trilogy. So for instance, Words of Radiance you can find breakpoints between quote-unquote books, that this volume is actually written as three books with a short story collection as the interludes woven between. That’s how I approach those books. My publisher has a love/hate relationship with the Stormlight Archive because they feel they could publish them as four volumes and make four times as much money but I won’t let them. But they don’t want me to write other things because they really want more Stormlight because Stormlight is the one that sells the best out of everything. So they are like “Write more Stormlight, but can we split it please?” and I say “No you can’t split it” and they go *arghhh* [...]

What’s your favorite magic system?

B: If I could pick anything I’d probably be an Allomancer, just because there is so much metal around us in our daily lives that I think it would be a lot of fun. That may not be the smart choice but it is the choice I would make

So I know your kids are probably too young to have read your books but are they familiar with your characters and if so do they have favorites?

B: They’re not familiar with my characters, 7, 5, and 2. The seven-year-old is getting old enough that I could read him books, but I don’t want to read him my books first. I want him to read stuff like Dragon’s Blood by Jane Yolen or something. We’ll let him read my books if he wants to. I remember I was reading an interview with Tad Williams once and he said “People ask, you’re a famous author, how do you stay humble” and he said “Well the other day we all went out as a family because I finished a book. And my son said ‘What’s the celebration?’ and I said ‘Well I finished my book’ and my son said ‘That’s a good job, finishing reading a book.’”

Are some of the [interlude] characters going to be making re-appearances?

B: Yes some of them will, I’m seeding characters who will become main characters later in the series by what I’m doing in that book, in those interludes. Not all of them will be. I have ten characters that are forming the spine for this series-- and like Lift is one of the ones who is going to be in the back five books which will take place-- After Book 5 of Stormlight we will have a break, in-world, for about fifteen years. Not out of the world, not in our world, but we will have a break and when we come back fifteen years or so will have passed and we will start on the back five characters.

I really like Alloy of Law, do you see yourself making anymore of those in-universe novellas? [...]

B: Yes I do see myself doing many more novellas. I enjoy the process, it helps me get stories out of my brain that are itching at me without having to start another 7 book series or whatever. What I reading to you tonight is from a novella but it is not cosmere. Though I do have several more cosmere novellas going. [discussion on currently released novellas and where to find them] I’m planning to do many more, I really enjoy it. I think short fiction is fun and exciting-- short for me

Do you know what’s wrong with Stephen Leeds?

B: Yes I do know what’s wrong with Stephen Leeds… Legion is another novella I’ve done that’s got a fun story behind it. I was in a writing group with a mutual friend Dan Wells, he writes twisted books about people who are messed up, and he was doing a book about schizophrenia. He was deep into a schizophrenic’s mind, he put in lot of research into these things and meanwhile I'm over here being me and I’m like “Oh this would make a great magic system” and like “No, no, no, really if you had a schizophrenic and what if they heard voices and saw hallucinations, but the hallucinations helped them. Like there superpower was seeing hallucinations. You should write this” and I tried to convince him to write it and tried until finally he said “Brandon, write the dumb book, it’s not my book it’s yours” So I wrote it and it’s called Legion. [explains a little about the concept of Legion]

So is he getting worse?

B: *hesitates* Over the course of the series he is getting worse and worse, despite what he says.

Are you going to write a sequel to Sixth of the Dusk?

B: I’m not planning to write a sequel to it, though you may see people from that world, or even Sixth himself, in other books if you keep your eyes open.

Can you talk a little about flash fiction?

B: I think flash fiction, micro fiction, is awesome. I’m terrible at it. I’ve tried it a couple times. I’ve got a good friend, Eric James Stone, he’s one a Nebula Award, and his business cards have a story on the back. That’s the coolest thing ever. I want to steal that and use it but every one I come up with is junk. It takes like eight pages to write a name, so…

This is one you probably aren’t going to answer, but how old is Hoid?

Hoid is older than [???] He is very old.

Can you talk a little about your editing process? In your acknowledgements there’s this huge team of people that have been pouring over this thing.

B: Here’s my drafting process. First draft I just write straight through, I don’t stop, if there is something major I need to change I just change it in the chapter and keep going forward. And then I can change it back later, like two chapters later if I think “No that was the wrong thing”. So there will be a new character sometimes in my book that will just pop up for three chapters and everyone acts like they’ve always been there and then they vanish and no one talks about them not being there anymore. That’s just so I can keep momentum and see what works. Draft number 2 I fix all of those things. Draft number 3, polishing draft. Line by line trying to cut 10%, get rid of the passive voice, make descriptions more active, and that I’m finding the right words and things like that. So Draft 4 is where it turns into true drafting, and by that point I’ve given it to my editor and my alpha readers which are basically my assistants, my good friends, people like that. They read it and they come back with comments for me and I’ve been thinking about the book, working in my writing group with it and I make a goal-based document, where it’s like “Here are the major issues. Here are the medium level issues. Here are the little things I need to fix.” And I start on page one, read through with this [document] on the screen next to the book when I’m working on it and I try-- It’s almost like a bug report for programmings, I”m trying to clear things off the list. Major things I have to re-write the whole way through so I can’t clear them off until the end. Medium issues are things I can put in two or three times to fix a few chapters where they are wrong and then clear it. Little things are just fix this one little thing and it’s easy to clear off the list. I do that, I don’t get to everything. [...] Then I send the book out to beta readers, who are gathered by my assistant, he handles this Peter Ahlstrom. Then they do a thing with us on a Google Doc, where it’s chapter by chapter there is a document for each chapter and they all put their comments and interact with each other. It’s like having a very large focus group, with like 15 people who are all reading the book at the same time and working on it. Once that is done and I’ve heard back from my editor on the new draft I will then make another draft. I will do this as many times as necessary to make the book good. Last draft is proofreading and those people are often drawn from fandom, my assistant picks them off forums and things like that and people we’ve used before. At that point we can’t change anything bigger than a line or two. They are looking for continuity and things like that. But my process is that goal-based “I want to fix /this/ let’s see if I can do a draft where I fix this.” And I”ll do a couple more polishing drafts as I go along.

[question about prefered reading formats for Brandon’s books]

[He doesn’t care, whatever people like whether it’s borrowing from cousin bobby or audible or ebook]

Did you like to write as a child?

B: Actually no, I did not like to write as a child. I’m one of the few people who are a writer who was not a kid writer, I didn’t like books when I was young. It was a teacher who taught me to like books when I was in eighth grade, Ms. Reader, that’s her real name. She just emailed me a few weeks back, I’m still in touch with her. Ms. Reader, she’s now a professor taught me to love fantasy books, she gave me the book Dragonsbane by Barbara Hamley and I became a reader

[favorite video games]

B: The Dark Souls series, I started on Demon Souls when it was actually hard, but I like them all. I like the level design, I like that they’re not coddling you. I’ve always loved the Civilization games, I play those quite extensively. In fact when I was in college I spent many a long night in my friends room playing Civilization, until he was like “Go to bed”. I just played Skyrim, i tend to wait a few years on those games so I can get mods and things l like. I thought Skyrim was the best of the Elder Scrolls games, I’ve played them all since Daggerfall and they fixed a lot of the problems like the leveling was always bad and some of the dungeon designs were so repetitive. This one they fixed all that and I had a blast.

[discussion on what it is like writing for a video game-- Brandon’s like I don’t really know yet]

[discussion on graphic novels and how White Sand is being made into one]

[Kurkistan]

Thanks for the transcription, Weiry.

 

@kareokean

 

We could probably still use your recording since it looks like (?) the one on Tumblr had a few blurry parts to it.

[Asperity]

So Sixth might be a worldhopper. That's interesting.

 

Also nice to see Brandon has good taste in games. Demon's Souls was always the best Souls game.

[kaellok]

omg...that section where he's talking about being an author with children is the best.  I love the story about Tad Williams, and I also love that he just immediately was all, "I'm gonna make my kids read Jane Yolen's Dragon's Blood."  

 

ty for posting the recording, and the transcription.

[Argent]

So Sixth might be a worldhopper. That's interesting.

 

Not necessarily. If The Ones Above are Scadrians we could see Sixth in the sci-fi Mistborn series (Era 4 books, as it is apparently known internally)

[Titan Arum]

The most interesting take-away for me was that we can look for Sixth of the Dusk elsewhere. It doesn't necessarily mean he's a Worldhopper, but he could be. I agree with Argent, that he could be taken off-world by the Ones Above; however, whether they are Scadrian or not is irrelevant. 

 

The good thing about this revelation is that we know what he looks like. Maybe we'll see him the same way we discovered Vasher. My guess is it'll be because he has Aviars with him. At least he probably won't be like WalDo or the Terriswoman Worldhopper. Those two we have no idea who they may be.

[Asperity]

Not necessarily. If The Ones Above are Scadrians we could see Sixth in the sci-fi Mistborn series (Era 4 books, as it is apparently known internally)

Oh that's right. Fair enough.

[Curiosity]

In regards to the age of Hoid: I listened to the audio, and I distinctly heard that Hoid is older than the Shattering of Adonalsium. 

[vineyarddawg]

In regards to the age of Hoid: I listened to the audio, and I distinctly heard that Hoid is older than the Shattering of Adonalsium. 

 

I just listened to the audio, as well, and I agree that's what Brandon said.

[Asperity]

In regards to the age of Hoid: I listened to the audio, and I distinctly heard that Hoid is older than the Shattering of Adonalsium. 

We've known that Hoid was present at the Shattering so I figured that was a given.

[karaokeang]

The talk, reading and Q&A will be released as a podcast by the library so I didn't record that. We will get a clean copy soon. I recorded the signing. One file is over an hour long and the other is just a few minutes.

Link to all the recordings I have done https://drive.google.com/folder/d/0B16BdcRPMD7BTzhTS1dkdzk2RUU/edit

Edited January 10, 2015 by karaokeang

[WeiryWriter]

@several  Thanks for that, I thought he said something like "Shatter-" but I couldn't tell 100% without going back and listening again which the player wasn't letting me do.  (Well I could have but I would have had to listen to the entire thing over again which I had neither the time nor the patience for at the time)

 

@karakoeng Thanks for sharing the recording, I'll try and transcribe it today.  In the folder it looks like there are three files from last march and one from this month, is that correct?

[karaokeang]

That is correct. I never posted the March 8th here but they are in the folder if you guys want them. The files from Jan 7th is signing only. Reading and Q&A will be released in a podcast with awesome audio so I didn't record it. there should be 2 from the signing.

Edited January 12, 2015 by karaokeang

[WeiryWriter]

That is correct. I never posted the March 8th here but they are in the folder if you guys want them. The files from Jan 7th is signing only. Reading and Q&A will be released in a podcast with awesome audio so I didn't record it. there should be 2 from the signing.

 

In the folder I can only see four files, three are dated from march, only one is dated from january.

 

The transcription is in progress but my computer was being stupid so it's handwritten so far.  I'll try to finish and type it up tomorrow.

[Oudeis]

A question for anyone who got one of the Epic cards: Do they have stats on them like the Szeth card does for the game?

 

(I'd be surprised if they did as the stats seem very Realmatic-centric).

[WeiryWriter]

A question for anyone who got one of the Epic cards: Do they have stats on them like the Szeth card does for the game?

 

(I'd be surprised if they did as the stats seem very Realmatic-centric).

 

I'm at the tail end of the recording and Brandon just mentioned that they do not, because they are not in-cosmere.

[Oudeis]

I'm at the tail end of the recording and Brandon just mentioned that they do not, because they are not in-cosmere.

 

As expected, for the expected reason.

 

You're at the tail-end of the recording? ... So... transcript soon? I WANT W'S-o-B!

 

Crazy fan? What crazy fan? ::goes back to costume-making::

[WeiryWriter]

As expected, for the expected reason.

 

You're at the tail-end of the recording? ... So... transcript soon? I WANT W'S-o-B!

 

Crazy fan? What crazy fan? ::goes back to costume-making::

 

I'm currently typing it up here.  It is still a rough transcription, but the jist of things is there.

[Kipper]

So Nightwatcher is probably cultivationspren, based on that transcript.

Edited January 12, 2015 by inexorablePanda

[dvoraen]

So Nightwatcher is probably cultivationspren.

The problem I'm having is trying to figure out what the Nightwatcher's Cognitive aspect is.  If we take the Stormfather at face value regarding "personification of storms and the divine," what would that make the Nightwatcher?

[WeiryWriter]

The confusing thing is that Brandon has said that the Stormfather and the Nightwatcher are /not/ the same sort of thing (I think the actual line is that the relationship between Cultivation/Nightwatcher is not the same as between Honor/Stormfather).  We also recently got WoB that the Stormfather is a Cognitive shadows of Honor (so technically I wouldn't call him a spren) but we know that Cultivation is still alive.

 

BTW I finished typing up the rough transcription.  I try to go back and fix/polish it but I had some difficulty parsing some of the stuff.  The recording didn't play particularly well for me.  So if someone else can give it a listen and help me out it would be much appreciated.