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Waygate Foundation Livestream: Part Deux


WeiryWriter

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So you remember back in January when Brandon did the livestream where he brainstormed a story about magic alien hair that holds memories with the people watching?  Well guess what is happening this Friday!  Brandon mentioned in his blog post today that he is doing the next part of the story in a livestream this Friday and he will also answer questions.

 

The livestream will be hosted at the Waygate Foundation page on Justin.tv: http://www.justin.tv/waygatefoundation

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  • 2 weeks later...

Thanks, Weiry. Some very interesting tidbits in there.

 

 

Q: Are there kandra hiding in any of your books, besides the Mistborn ones?

B: Yes there are! [smugly] yes there are…

 

WoR spoilers:

Suddenly, that "Taln is a kandra" theory doesn't seem quite so crackpot...

Edited by Moogle
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So I've finished the first pass of the transcription, I just need to go back and do the little hard to hear bits, but I figured I should share what I have since it has the gist of everything.
 


[36:30]
B: The question is that there is a scene in the Wheel of Time where Mat comes up with intricate backstories and rolls and assigning people [...]experience as a gamemaster and the answer is yes I do have experience as a gamemaster.  I don’t do it as much anymore, as I used to.  I found that gamemastering and writing novels share a lot in common and if I spent all day writing I was a pretty terrible GM [...] flexed all those muscles and I was exhausted.  Now that I write full-time, doing my work all day and then going and doing more work all night was very hard for me. [...] just be a player.

[37:15]
WeiryWriter: What are Cultivation’s feelings with regards to the Stormfather?
B: Cultivation’s feelings-- I don’t think that has spoilers-- Cultivation is, um uhhh [long pause] I just have to decide how I can say things that are not spoilers.  Cultivation, the Stormfather reminds her of certain things about someone else she knew, and she feels the same way about the Stormfather in some ways as this person she knew.

[38:00]
Q: Alcatraz 5
B: When am I going to write Alcatraz 5?  I have a few things on my plate but I do want to finish it.  I have re-releases of the series coming out next year probably.  We sold the series to Tor, I bought it back from Scholastic.  We are repackaging them with new covers and we are hiring an illustrator to illustrate them, to have cool illustrations all through the book.  It looks like we’ll have 25-30, little half-pagers and things like that through the book.  We have a map, Isaac is commissioning a very nice map.  And then we are going to re-release them and so I will try to have Book 5 come out when we have that going.

[38:55]
Q: Are there kandra hiding in any of your books, besides the Mistborn ones?
B: Yes there are! [smugly] yes there are...

[39:03]
Q: When are you going to work on the next Mistborn book?
B: Right now I am going to write Rithmatist 2, followed by Stormlight 3, and the next Mistborn book is going to come after that.  Tor has asked that I write the next Stormlight book before I write the next Mistborn books, so I will be doing that.  I do have a chunk of the sequel written, but I had to put off writing it till later.

[39:28]
Q: Any hints at the thing hiding in the maps of Roshar?
B: The map of Roshar, what hints can I give you? The same thing is hiding in all of the maps of Roshar.  All of the ones we have done so far have the same thing.

[39:48]
Q: You said you usually brainstorm a story for for six months, how much of the story do you need to know before you can start to write?
B: For me, I need to at least have an ending in mind and powerful points along the way that are going to make for great scenes, in fact you will see what I like to do later tonight as we work on this outline.  I’ll talk more about it at that time.

[40:15]
Q: Will Hoid ever have a book of his own?
B: Yes he will. He will several.

[40:21]
Q: Is Harmony aware of events on Rosahr?
B: [hesitantly] Yeeeeeeees, some of them.

[40:29]
Q: Will you tell us a little about the sword from Warbreaker?
B: Nightblood is a weapon that I devised.  He is partially inspired by my love of Michael Moorcock’s writing [books?].  He was built into the cosmere using many of the foundational cosmere magic system things that exist on multiple worlds.

[41:02]
Q: [...]
B: Do Nightblood and TenSoon have the same voice?
Q: [...]
B: You read Nightblood and TenSoon with the same voice, okay. Sure… Suuuure…  Yes they totally can.

[41:25]
Q: [...]
B: Shadows for Silence, cosmere timeline, where does it fall with the rest of the books.  It is middle cosmere, a little on the late side but not-- It is pre-Stormlight Archive, so yeah.

[41:45]
Q: [...]
B: Why was the base form of Shardblades chosen to be blades, as swords? It’s because the Shardblades were devised-- I can’t spoil the second book-- They were devised as imitations of the honorblades, which were created and given to the heralds.  So since the original pattern was the honorblades, they were built to feel like the honorblades.

[59:00]
*talks about novelist themed reality shows*

[1:06:40]
Q: How much more do you want to write about Stephen Leeds?
B: How much more do I want to write about Stephen Leeds, from Legion?  I want to write a decent amount more.  I have finished Legion 2, which you may have noticed, which is called Legion: Skin Deep.  I had a really great name for a title, but I don’t know if I can use it because Skin Deep is a reference to beauty, right? But I thought a great title would be Legion: Lies of the Beholder.  I like the pun on that but that is also “beauty is in the eyes of the beholder so I can’t make them all puns off of beauty.  The original concept with Legion was to do a short that would-- I imagine being a television show, it’s how I imagined it and I wanted to do future episodes, so to speak.  I particularly love the episode format they are doing for Sherlock on the BBC, if you guys have seen that, where your season is three hour-and-a-half long mini movies basically.  And I love that format for a television show, I wish we could get more television shows doing that.  I would rather sink my teeth into an hour-and-a-half episode that has character growth, real growth and development and progress and the next one doesn’t just hit the reset button and [...] another adventure.  It is progressing the characters further.  I’d rather get three of those in a season than a twenty-two episode where of those episodes eighteen are just yet another adventure with no progress.  And so-- Anyway that’s how I imagine that.
Q: [...]
B: Yes, we sold the rights and then they let them lapse.  They kept the rights for two years and they let them lapse.

[1:08:40]
Q: Is Hemalurgy still practiced during Harmony’s reign?
B: Yes.

[1:08:45]
WeiryWriter: Current status of the White Sand graphic novel?
B: We have chosen a writer and the writing is quite good.  We are very pleased with it, the person who’s adapting the story.  We have not chosen the artist yet, we have had several that have been sent to us.  Each of them are doing an application with their art and we are now choosing among them.  We are looking for professional comic book and graphic novel illustrators and so if there happened to be one of you out there who has done professional work in this field and has done-- [...] you have to have be willing to commit to doing a lot of work and you have to work with dynamite and things like this.  Then you are more than welcome to contact us, but I think we are close to picking somebody.

[1:09:40]
Q: When will second book of Legion be out on Audible?
B: Probably, I think November 1st is the scheduled release date and I think Audible-- I can’t promise this, but I think we are going to do the same thing we did with the first one, which is it will be free on Audible for like the first two months because they are short enough that charging a full credit for them is kind of, you know, they are one-third of a book but you can’t really split a credit to one-third credits.  So if you do want to go buy Legion off of Audible, the Audible version is very nice and I think they sell it for five bucks or something, don’t use a credit just go spend five bucks on it. And the second one-- We did that one free for the first few months, and I think we may do the second one free for the first few months also.
Q: Are they planning to go that for Infinity Blade, like for an Audible release?
B: I don’t think there are plans right now, but the fact that you are interested makes me think maybe we should ask if they are interested.

[1:10:39]
Q: [...]
B: [...] theme of creating people in The Emperor’s Soul, is that an example of my brainstorming process? It is actually drawing upon some of those same things so I would say that is a true analogy.

[1:10:55]
Q: When will we see a Hoid book?
B: You will see a Hoid book-- You will NOT see a Hoid book until I finish the first five books of Stormlight and the next Mistborn trilogy at the earliest.  More likely is after Stormlight is done.

[1:11:15]
Q: From the moment you begin worldbuilding Roshar how long did it take you before it really resembled what we read in The Way of Kings and Words of Radiance?
B: Resembled? I would say about a year.  But I started worldbuilding it in 2001, if you read the version I wrote in 2002 you would say “This feels like Roshar” but the spren weren’t in it yet.

[1:11:48]
Q: Are we going to see any chapters that are expressly(?) Hoid now that he is becoming more and more important?
B: You have seen two. Are you going to see more? Yes.  I would say that if you look at the structure of the first two Stormlight books, you will find several themes and those themes are likely to be repeated in future books.  And Hoid does like having the last word.

[1:12:37]
Q: Did the original sixteen Shardholders all know each other?
B: Yes they at least-- Yes, I would say that they did.

[1:12:50]
Q: Pat Rothfuss themed question.  Pat Rothfuss did an episode of TableTop with Wil Weaton, would you be open to doing an episode of TableTop?
B: Yes I would be.

[1:12:58]
Q: Can you tell “Who killed Asmodean” story?
B: I just told this here, but I can tell it quickly for you guys.  I told it at JordanCon but I haven’t told it online [...] it is really simple, when I walked in to get the notes from Harriet on the very first book that I was going to [...] before I started working.  On the top there was a post-it note attached to a piece of paper which listed a fan theory as to who killed Asmodean and written in Robert Jordan’s handwriting, which was confirmed to be his, was “This is right”.  And that is all we had.  Was the fan theory and the post-it note.  And so we decided to put who killed Asmodean in the Appendix of the book because we felt that I got it somewhat like an appendix, a post-it note [...] so I wanted you to feel like I did.

[1:14:30]
Q: [...]
B: Hoid waxes poetic on the idea that the more people expect the harder it is on the artist.  This is more the critic in me having noticed my own expectations for a piece play dramatically into how much I enjoy it.  My best experiences at the cinema have been films where I had no idea what to expect, the Sixth Sense was like this for me.  I had never heard of the film, my friends dragged me to it, they said its a horror and I said “I’m not sure if I want to watch a slasher fic, its probably going to be horrible but whatever” And I watched it and it was a great movie and I came out of it saying “Wow, I did not expect that.” And yet something like the Dark Knight Returns, which is a fantastic film [...] well done.  Yet the second one was so good that I went into the third and it wasn’t quite as good as the second film and I came out and said “Eh” where it is a great film and yet my expectations-- It is unfair to the artist but it is the way I think a lot of us work.  That our expectations do play a lot into how our experience is for the story.  A lot of things that I go into things like that, I’m not trying to let the author speak so much as I’m trying to [...] how someone who analyzes art like a critic in my analyzes art what would be an observation they would make.  Hoid is not me and he does not voice necessarily my personal opinions but he is an artist and a critic so he notices some of the things I notice.

[1:16:55]
Q: How do I feel about Robert Jordan’s intense obsession with clothing especially when it came to the female characters and what they were wearing.
B: I think it has lent a great depth to the Wheel of Time world and a lot of people who are really into costuming love it.  So I’m glad that something Robert Jordan was fascinated in was able to make his stories better for his audience.  The clothing descriptions were not something that I latched onto as much. I’m like “yeah it’s a dress”.  But a great novel will have a lot of different things for a lot of different people and I am very impressed by what Robert Jordan was able to do.

[2:10:55]
Q: Did Ben or Isaac design the glyphs in The Stormlight Archive?
Isaac: I did.  So here’s an interesting thing the-- [trolling] no I’m not going to tell you that.  *lots of laughter* I think it would be a spoiler for Book 3.  Bridge Four in Alethi, you guys ready? Vev Gesheh.  Vev is the number four, Gesheh is bridge.  When I design the glyphs, I always make sure I know how to say it in Alethi before I design the glyph.
Ben: Is there a reason for that?
Isaac: There is a reason for that.
Ben: Are you going to tell us what that reason is?
Isaac: Nope.  The glyph writing system is just a-- You are supposed to be able to look at it and say “Hey that’s-- That means bridge” but it could be elongated, it could be changed, it could be-- but the same shapes are in there and that means “bridge” or whatever else that is.

[2:12:46]
Isaac: The glyphs don’t really relate to pronunciation.  You learn them from seeing the glyph and knowing what the word is for that.  But the people, the people who create the glyphs have a different process from those who read them.
Q: [...]
Isaac: It can be somewhat difficult to draw the glyphs, we generally go through several iterations of different looks of things before we come up with something that we like.

[2:55:50]
Q: [...]
B: Which character did I relate with the most? I have been asked this a ton in the Wheel of Time, and I related most with Perrin by far.  Perrin was my man, I really enjoyed reading about him.  So being able to do some of the stuff I did with Perrin was very fulfilling.  I would say the forging of the hammer scene is something I was very eager to be able to do something like that and was happy though sad that Robert Jordan didn’t get a chance to do it that I came to it there was a lot of stuff I could do with Perrin.  Perrin was one of the least outlined-- In fact I would say the least outlined main character in Robert Jordan’s notes.  We had very little about what to do with Perrin and I was able to say then “Good, this is a character I am very comfortable with and I know what I can do with Perrin.”

[2:57:14]
Q: Lift stands outside Kredik Shaw, her goal is to eat the Lord Ruler’s lunch, can she get a way with it?
B: I think she totally can.  She’s Lift, she’ll just get him while he’s sleeping.

[2:57:28]
Q: Which book are you most proud of writing?
B: I would say A Memory of Light is the book I am most proud of.

[2:57:35]
Q: Hoid mentions that no story is new, is repeated, this feels like Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time overarching philosophy, any connection?
B: Certainly, though it is more a storyteller’s connection.  Storytellers know that the same stories are told over and over and we have just learned to interpret them differently for our different lives.

[2:57:52]
Q: Will we get more of Lift?
B: You will get a lot more with Lift.  She was written into the outline from the very begining as one of the people who gets a book of her own.

[2:58:04]
Q: [...]
B: With Lift part of the inspiration was-- Boy, what was the inspiration for Lift? When I was building the Stormlight Archive I said “I want the Knights Radiant to run the gamut of different character styles, ages, and types of story.”  And when you say “knight”-- When I say knight you imagine one thing, what you don’t imagine is a thirteen-year-old hispanic girl, right? And I said “I want to have the people who are in the Knights Radiant to not be the standard what you think of.”  They are the entire world’s cultures having different people.  And so I said “What are somebody who does not fit that mold?” That you would say is not a knight.  Lift was partially developed out of me wanting to build a character who was awesome but was so different from what everyone would think of. ‘Cause you say knight and they think of white dude in armor and I wanted something very different from that.  And that’s where she came from.  It also came partially from my wife reading a lot of fantasy and complaining and she’s like “You know the asians show up in fantasy, asian culture inspires a lot.  European culture of course does.  You see a lot of these things but where are the hispanics?”
[...]
Yeah there’s one.  So she challenged me to put a hispanic culture in my books because I had never done it before and so Lift is an outgrowth of that, so are the Herdazians.  They are meant to be sort of in the same way that the Alethi are inspired by Korean culture, mashed up with this sort of concept of medieval knights.  Shallan is based a little off of Western American/Europe culture.  The Herdazians are launching off some of the original hispanic concepts.  So the thing is, you want every culture to be new and original but you are working from somewhere.  And the problem is we all work from the same stories for so long that is part of the reason why fantasy is starting to feel so stale.

[3:00:40]
Q: [...]
B: Is there a possibility of finding out what happened to--
Q: [...]
B: Is there another book? We are not going to be doing anymore Wheel of Time books.  Robert Jordan was very uncomfortable with people writing in his world, he was even uncomfortable with someone finishing the story, and so I feel that it would be inappropriate to continue on even though he was planning to do so.  So I have to leave those to your imagination.  I think out of respect for his wishes the right thing to do is not do more.  It’s not my choice, I can only say that with confidence because I spoke to Harriet about it and this is her feeling as well, so I can-- During one of our very early meetings she came to me and said “What do you think of these” and I said “I don’t think they should be done” and she said “That’s exactly what I think, I think we should present a unified front on this.  I appreciate that that is how you feel because that is how I want.  So let’s go that way”.  It was totally her decision.

[3:01:54]
Q: If you are on the show [TableTop] do you have a prefered game you would like to play?  Basically do you have a favorite tabletop game?
B: Does Magic: The Gathering count? ‘Cause it is on the top of a table.  If not Magic, what is my favorite tabletop game?  *insert sound like “arg” but not “arg”* I played the Pratchett board game recently, that was fun.  I don’t know if I have a favorite other than Magic.

[3:02:31]
Q: Have you decided on the POV characters for the back five of The Stormlight Archive?
B: Yes I did.  When I created the original ten book outline I did decide everybody who was going to have a book.

[3:02:41]
Q: Concerning everything on Roshar, is it safe to say The Stormlight Archive will become the backbone series of the story of the cosmere?
B:  There are three backbone series: Dragonsteel, Mistborn, and The Stormlight Archive.  And Mistborn is past, present, future, Stormlight is the center, and Dragonsteel is the beginning.  So really it goes: Dragonsteel, Mistborn, Stormlight, Mistborn, Stormlight, Mistborn.  Is basically how this backbone sequence goes.

[3:03:13]
Q: [...]
B:  The drawing glyphs is based on Korean and Chinese writing systems.  I’m Mormon, I served a mission in Korea for two years, loved the writing system and the language.  It was part of what inspired me to do that.  There is this really cool thing where in Korea they used Chinese characters to write for a long time and they are very difficult to learn because you just have to memorize them and there was a great king Sejong who said “My people are being mostly illiterate because these are so hard and we don’t even speak Chinese, we are not Chinese.  We use their characters, can we develop a language, a writing system that will allow us to do this” and his scholars got together and devised Korean which is a way to phonetically write Chinese characters kind of, it’s their own thing.  You write them in little groups to make little Chinese characters, it’s the coolest thing ever.  But you can right most Korean things, not everything, most you can write as a Chinese character or as a phonetic Korean construction of three letters that create that Chinese character sound and I liked that idea and it spun me into the idea of the Aons and the Aonic language and things like that.

[3:04:36]
Q: What does Glys look like?
B: Uhhm, RAFO. [smiles]  Looks like a big RAFO.

[3:05:27]
Q: What’s it looking like for the book series of The Rithmatist?
B: I am writing the second one right now, it is my current project.  It is going to be a trilogy.  The second one should be out next summer.  And they are going to go to South America.

[3:06:20]
Q: Hoid can regrow his head, so can the Lord Ruler, what would happen if you cut them both off and switched them?
B: That’s… really weird.

[3:06:27]
Q: Have you read the original six Dune books?
B: Yes, and when I think of them they are fantastic but the later ones were so dense it was a-- they were a lot harder for me to parse but I thought they were brilliant anyway.

[3:06:37]
Q: Will we get a book about the stick?
B: No, you will not get a book about the stick.

[3:10:00]
Brandon and Pat discuss the collab “versus” book

[3:19:13]
*Brandon’s favorite Firefly character is Wash.*

 

One thing that seemed odd to me, that hopefully Peter might be able to clear up, is that Isaac refers to having to know how the name of the glyph is pronounced in Alethi before designing it.  However the text indicates that the glyphs are not exclusively Alethi, does he just mean he needs to know it is pronounced?

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Did you miss transcribing my question? I asked who would win in an epic singing contest: Hoid or Kvothe.

 

Unfortunately, it seems like Kvothe would take it. Brandon said that while Hoid is technically good, he doesn't have it as part of his soul like Kvothe does.  Hoid's soul is more oriented towards stories.

 

The outcome of their rap battle, however, remains to be seen...

 

EDIT: Didn't read (enough) before I posted. First pass. I get it... I think mine was the last question.

Edited by bartbug
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Did you miss transcribing my question? I asked who would win in an epic singing contest: Hoid or Kvothe.

 

Unfortunately, it seems like Kvothe would take it. Brandon said that while Hoid is technically good, he doesn't have it as part of his soul like Kvothe does.  Hoid's soul is more oriented towards stories.

 

The outcome of their rap battle, however, remains to be seen...

 

Yeah... I'll get around to transcribing that...

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B: The drawing glyphs is based on Korean and Chinese writing systems. I’m Mormon, I served a mission in Korea for two years, loved the writing system and the language. It was part of what inspired me to do that. There is this really cool thing where in Korea they used Chinese characters to write for a long time and they are very difficult to learn because you just have to memorize them and there was a great king *not even going to attempt to transcribe this* who said “My people are being mostly illiterate because these are so hard and we don’t even speak Chinese, we are not Chinese. We use their characters, can we develop a language, a writing system that will allow us to do this” and his scholars got together and devised Korean which is a way to phonetically write Chinese characters kind of, it’s their own thing. You write them in little groups to make little Chinese characters, it’s the coolest thing ever. But you can right most Korean things, not everything, most you can write as a Chinese character or as a phonetic Korean construction of three letters that create that Chinese character sound and I liked that idea and it spun me into the idea of the Aons and the Aonic language and things like that.

The Korean king he's talking about here is Sejong the Great btw. I remember him from World History class earlier this year.
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The tidbit about Hemalurgy being practiced during Harmony's reign is very interesting to me. I know people have speculated about Bloody Tan and whether or not he was a Hemalurgist. It's also possible that Brandon is trolling us, because we know that Marsh, the kandra and the koloss are still around and they are also practicing Hemalurgy...

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