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Blightsong

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Anyone in or around Atlanta, Brandon will be heading to a con near you this weekend. The information is up on his website now.

 

I highly recommend attending if you are a fan of Brandon and fantasy as a whole. I won't be able to attend, but I was able to go to a con Brandon was at earlier this year and it was a great experience. I highly recommend the "Hour with Brandon Sanderson" event for anyone looking to get some questions answered.

 

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@Argent i am listening the recording of the Q&A and as far as I can, I am transcript the whole to post here. Someone, asking for something different obtain the answer for your Roshar-Coin question. It's about at 51:05 in the recording, you have a of course a better ear than me about the English

EDIT:
 

For the first 36 minutes the question are pretty about writing.

[36:20]
Q: On the planet of Nalthis, is the method with which people are chosen as Returned an autonomous system that is not governed by intelligent Entity ?
A: No, good question

[36:55]
THis is very hard to understand to me, the sense is pretty clear but the wording is messy fo my ears.

[40:20]
Q: Stormlight feels very to me on so many levels. You've got the interludes where we get a lot of world-building, get to see more of the planet that just one place. But there is also a sense a lot of your books we are experiencing the aftermath of something. And in Stormlight that something is coming.
How is this affecting the way that you are building your world for us ?
A: (problems to follow the actual answer's wording but it's actually about his early days as unpublished author)

[49:15]
(I don't get the question and the answer was about what inspired the concept of the Shardblade, then about the Final Fantasy, his favorite (FF 10) and what he loved of it (Voice acting and a not depressed main character) )

[51:05]
(I hope here someone else may fill it, it's an interesting question about "how to find Worldhoppers in books")

[55:20]
Q:Is a Larkin capable of pushing Stormlight into someone as well as pulling out ?
A: An excellent question, they actually eat on Investiture, as some other people and things that you see.
Q: so this is a NO
A: This is more a NO than a Yes

Q: this is actually how Szeth has been resurrected ? (this question made no sense, so probably I heard it wrong)
A: that is correct, yes. You saw how that came back foreshadow earlier in the books , if you watch (noise) the means by whitch that happens is in there
Q: How much earlier ?
A: ...Book one.
Note: I thought he talked about LIft's interlude and her regrow...but it happens in book 2.

[56:40]
(Question about if Brandon would return to WoT to write about the Trolloc's wars)

[58:20]
(it start with a joke I don't understand)
Q:You mentioned in the last couple of (I don't understand the word but from the context He talk about Ars Arcanum where Khriss talk about what we call "perks") that you get interesting results when you mix type of investitures.
A: yes
Q: Can you mix a form of magic with a source of investiture ? Vasher uses stormlight replacing Breath or that requires (word I don't understand) like Hemalurgy or something like that ?
A: Most of them required (again the word I don't understand). Some of them are little bit easier than others. It's depends on really what you need. For istance, white sand can be charged in the presence of any Investiture right? But it's not really using the magic, is just charging it with other Investiture but you know it would be very easy for istance to use Breath to fuel...Windrunning right? Because the oath and the bond and things like that make it pretty easy. However fueling Allomancy with something else is going to be a lot harder. So it really depends on the magic. It's the sort of thing that there will be lots of science in the books dedicated to making happen in the future and you will find some of the process these work easiser than other ones.

[1:00:00]
(there is a nice introduction about the magic systems)
Q: Do you have any particular metric for meshing together the rules you creates for a system and create a balance that alloows you to tell a compelling story with it ?
A: (hard to fully follow)

[1:02:48]

(Question about KR progression, their "unlock" powers and if they have to say the same oaths inside a specific order)

I am sorry but this is the better I can understand.

Edited by Yata
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10 hours ago, Yata said:

[51:05]
(I hope here someone else may fill it, it's an interesting question about "how to find Worldhoppers in books")

He basically says to look for people who say the wrong words. Like people talking about coins on Roshar or just generally talking about something in a wrong way (I guess cultural differences).

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10 hours ago, Oversleep said:

He basically says to look for people who say the wrong words. Like people talking about coins on Roshar or just generally talking about something in a wrong way (I guess cultural differences).

Yeah I know, but here often the wording are really relevant...it's the reason I avoided to write something if I was unsure about the spoken words

Edited by Yata
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16 hours ago, Yata said:

@Argent

 

Q: this is actually how Szeth has been resurrected ? (this question made no sense, so probably I heard

I didn't hear the question wellbut the answer was along the lines that he foreshadowed the method for Szeth's resurrection in book 1. I took this to be a reference to Dalinar's vision where he was healed by a fabrial.

16 hours ago, Yata said:

Q: Do you have any particular metric for meshing together the rules you creates for a system and create a balance that alloows you to tell a compelling story with it ?
A: (hard to fully follow)

Again, just nailing down the essence of what he said, it was about how he tries to be consistent with what he does, even if he has to bend the rules a bit. The example was how speed bubbles dont cause redshift and iradiate everyone. He came up with a reason why this doesn't happen and is consistent with it.

Also, he errs on the side of awesome.

16 hours ago, Yata said:

[1:02:48]

(Question about KR progression, their "unlock" powers and if they have to say the same oaths inside a specific order)

I am sorry but this is the better I can understand.

With this one he basically said RAFO but that we would definitely see how KR progression varies between orders and even individuals within the same order.

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4 hours ago, Shardbearer said:

I didn't hear the question wellbut the answer was along the lines that he foreshadowed the method for Szeth's resurrection in book 1. I took this to be a reference to Dalinar's vision where he was healed by a fabrial.

Yes, but for the wording seems that is a question linked to the previous (about the Larkin) and this confused me.

Probably @Blightsong was there, maybe He may help us to recover the noisy parts 

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16 minutes ago, Blightsong said:

I wish I'd been there, but this is an especially busy time of the year for me so I count make it. I made the thread in the hopes that people who went would post any new information they had gotten.

Oh sorry, I completely misunderstood the situation

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I went to the Q&A, as well as his reading (and some other panels). I'm on the way home right now, but when I get back I'll help transcribe. Also, I got a question during the reading (paraphrasing Q from memory, but answer is verbatim)

Q: Could feruchemical Nicrosil be used to store other invested abilities, such as a Returned breath or the abilities of the Knights Radiant?

A: Yes, that's possible 

I don't recall any other "realmatic theory" type questions, just personal writing stuff.

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11 minutes ago, kingbirdy said:

Q: Could feruchemical Nicrosil be used to store other invested abilities, such as a Returned breath or the abilities of the Knights Radiant?

A: Yes, that's possible

This would be a really suicide, anyway cool question and a great confirm to the extent of Feruchemical nicrosil's power

Edited by Yata
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Since @Rasarr already posted a good transcription for the first 36 minutes, I've just done after that, really just cleaning up @Yata's. 

[36:20]

Q: On the planet of Nalthis (Warbreaker's planet) is the method with which dead people are chosen as Returned an autonomous system that is not governed by an intelligent entity?

A: No, good question.*audience laughter* Yeah, I was hoping for one of those. [meaning a "realmatics" question]

[36:54]

Q: So, I wanted you ask: you, I think more than almost any other fantasy author, you create universes and then you leave them behind. I feel like you could have pages of a physics lecture for each of your universes and you'd have equations for everything. Have you always had these ideas for these various universes with gods and magic systems and things like that, or are you always creating them as you go?

A: Its yes and no. A lot of the ones you're seeing in the cosmere are things I created at the beginning to be kind of what the cosmere was. But I left some holes intentionally cause I knew I would come up with cool things that I wanted to add, and so I built in that wiggle room, and I'm always coming up with new ones, and there are way more that I want to do than I can write, like the one I keep wanting to find a chance for is like - do you guys know how Nikolai Tesla tried to create wireless energy? I think I've talked about this one. Like, he tried to create wireless energy, and I'm like "what if there were a world where that happened naturally"? Where you had an actual current going, and you could set your lantern on the ground and it would create a current and your lantern would just turn on, you don't need electricity, and you could have giant toads that could shoot out electrodes in their tongue that would create a current, like tazer tongues? *Brandon makes tazer noises* Stuff like this. And so, I started jumping in to looking at electricity and things like this, and current and whatnot, and that's just all back there and I'm like "aww, someday I need to be able to write this." But there are so many things that I want to write that I just don't have the time for, so it's a yes and no.

followup Q: So you have "what if?" questions and then you build a universe from there?

A: Usually they're "what if?" questions, but Sanderson's zero-th law, you know I've got these laws on magic you can look up - they're named humbly after myself - so Sanderson's zero-th law is always err on the side of what's awesome. And usally it's less even a "what if?" than a "that's so cool, tazer toads!". Like if you really want to know the truth of where the stormlight archives started, there's all this cool stuff, like part of it was like "what if there was this storm like the storm on Jupiter", and then I eventually changed it to a storm that goes around the planet, something like that, but the real truth was "magical power armor! YEAH! Magical power armor is cool! Magical plate mail power armor! Why would you need plate mail power armor?" Y'know, and it starts with the really cool idea. Mistborn started with me hitting a fog bank at eighty miles per hour in my car and loving how it looked as it drove past and saying "is there a world where I can imitate this feel, where you can look out and it streams by." It's theses early visuals or concepts that make me say "Oooh, I wanna do that!". That is where my books really come from, and then I layer on top of them the "what ifs?" and a realistic ecology based around these ideas.

[40:18]

Q: Stormlight feels very different to me on so many levels, you've got hte interludes where get to get a lot more worldbuilding, we get to see more of the planet instead of just one place. But there's also this sense that in a lot of your books we're experiencing the aftermath of something, and in Stormlight that something is coming. How is this affecting the way that you are building your world for us?

A: So, this is gonna get you a story, okay? So here's the story - yeah, I have time. So, alright, darkest time in my writing career, okay? - was when I was writing books 11 and 12 unpublished. I was getting rejection letters - and they were rejection letters for things like Elantris and Dragonsteel, which I was really confident in. Elantris, Dragonsteel, and White Sand were the good books in the era of unpublished Brandon. White Sand by the way, is out as a graphic novel now. You can also read the prose version by emailing me by my website form, we just email it out for free, so you can compare it to the graphic novel. And by the way, Dragonsteel, you're like "Hoid's origin story" - we'll do that eventually. The shattered plains started in dragonsteel, and I pulled them out, and I pulled Dalinar out, and a bunch of stuff, when I build stormlight. And so it's a really schizophrenic book now - shizeophrenic is the wrong term, but half of it was what became Stormlight, and half of it is Hoid's origin story. So, the half that is Hoids origin story will eventually get a book. Anyway, darkest point- I'm not selling anything, everyone is telling me like "your books are too long", this is the number one things I'm getting from rejections, "your books are too long, and your books are not market friendly in that the worlds are too weird". I'm getting at a time - you gotta remember, I love George but you gotta remember this is right after George got huge, and George introduced gritty, low magic, earth-like fantasy as kind of "the thing" that was big. And his books were large too, I don't know why people kept telling me mine were too big, but they wanted gritty and they wanted low magic and they wanted earth-like. So I was getting rejection after rejection on these things. What people were buying were things like Joe Abercrombie's stuff, which is great, Joe's a great writer, but you know, short things that gave people a similar feel to George RR Martin, but you know, but were low magic, kind of earth-like medieval societies. Basically shorter versions of George is basically what they wanted. So I would go to cons and they would be like "have you read the beginning of game of thrones? write something like that" and so finally against better advice, I sat down and said "alright I'll try something like that". And you guys do not want to read Sanderson trying to be like George RR Martin. It was embarrassing, and so I wrote these books, each something different. And I like trying to do something different, I'm not sad I tried to do something different, but at the end I was like "I can't do this, these books are crap". Worst books I wrote were the two that were books 11 and 12, like I shouldn't be getting worse as a writer, I shouldn't be getting worse the more books I write, and finally I was like "screw it, I'm gonna write the biggest, baddest, most awesome book that I can!". They want it more short, this is gonna be twice as long! They say the world is too weird, I'm gonna do the weirdest world I've always wanted to do, I'm gonna write the type of fantasy book that nobody's writing that I wish they would write. And I'm gonna break all these rules that say "don't do flashbacks". Screw you, I'm gonna put flashbacks and they're long! They say "don't do prologues", screw you, I'm doing three prologues! It really does, because Way of Kigns starts with the Heralds prologues, then it goes to Szeth prologue, then it goes to the viewpoint of the guy in Kaladin's squad, also a prologue. Then it jumps like eight months and then we start the story. I did all the stuff they told me not to do because I just wanted to make the biggest, most coolest and baddest epic I could - bad in a good term. And I finished this book, which was basically flipping the bird to the entire publishing industry, right? And that - within a month of finish that is when Moesha [sp? - his editor], who I told you is bipolar, got manic and read through his backlist of books people had sent him, including one I'd sent him two years earlier, which was Elantris. He'd never looked at it, he read it in a night, he called me manic, and he said "I wanna buy your book!". And actually what happened is, he called me and I'd moved since then, and gotten a new phone number, we used to have landlines back then, I had a cellphone by then but I had a landline at the time, and I'd actually - this is gonna date me - my first email address was AOL. And then I realized AOL - I wont speak ill of AOL - yes I will, AOL sucked, and so I'm like "well I need to get my own email address", so I went and got one, but that meant the email had changed. So I sent to anyone who actively had one of my books on submission like "this is my new contact info", but he'd had it for two years, so I figured I was never seeing it - if you were on the last panel, I mentioned that I sent things into tor and they vanished, but I never got rejections - I never got rejected from Tor, I sent them four books, they're still sitting there somewhere I'm sure. But, so I finished this big beast of a book, right, and then I sell Elantris, and I'm like "great, now I don't know what to do". So my editor is like "well what are you working on now, I want to see that too", so I sent him Way of Kings, and I still remember after he called me, he was like "Uhh...Well this isn't the sort of thing that new authors usually publish. Can we split it?" and I said "No, you split the book and it's a really bad book, cause you have all the buildup but none of the payoff". And he's like "uggh", and I said "that's alright, I've got this idea for Mistborn", I pitched him Mistborn, "I'll do Way of Kings later", there were some things I wanted to fix about it, it actually needed something, and I didn't know what that something was yet, and I didn't learn it until working on the Wheel of Time, but that's a different story. But you're asking why is stormlight so different, and Stormlight is a series of my heart, this is the series I wrote when nothing else mattered, and I thought I might never get published and I just wanted to do what I felt that the genre needed that nobody was doing, right? And so I felt like fantasy needed to be pushed a little further in its worldbuilding, and so I did that. I felt like, there was a lot going on. The interludes were kind of my solution that Robert Jordan and George RR Martin were having, which - they were fantastic writers - I was able to learn from them, and Robert Jordan, one of the problems I think he was having was he fell in love with the side characters, and then these side characters took over the story to an extent that it was hard to manage. I'm not bashing on Robert Jordan, he talked about this, he talked about book 10 and how being a parallel novel was a mistake. I could learn from his mistakes, it doesnt make me a better writer, what it means is I can learn from what they did. And I said "okay, I'm gonna put pressure valves in my book, I'm gonna put a short story collection in each book where I'm gonna write about side characters, and those who wanna skip them can, and those who don't can read them", and I'll just make sure that I contain them in these short stories, these interludes, and that lets me do what I want but also lets the book keep its focus. So I'm doing a lot of things with these books that were like my love letter to the epic fantasy genre, and so I'm enthusiastic that you actually all like it and want to read them.

 

This is more of a pain than I realized so I'll return to it tomorrow and do some more - I'm through the 49 minute mark now.

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