Want Some Chapters from the Original Way of Kings? You'll Want to Fund This

There's something very cool happening: the campaign to fund the Altered Perceptions anthology. It's a campaign conceived by Brandon to help Robison Wells, who has crippling debt due to medical issues. It's a cool, awesome thing. And what can you get for doing it? Well, some chapters from the original draft of The Way of Kings.

As Brandon explains on his blog,

For it, I’m letting people see—for the first time—a large chunk of the original version of The Way of Kings, which I wrote in 2002–2003. This version is very different, and involves a different course in life for Kaladin as a character—all due to a simple decision he makes one way in this book, but a completely different way in the published novel.

These chapters are quite fun, as I consider what happened in The Way of Kings Prime (as I now call it) to be an “alternate reality” version of the events in the published books. The characters are almost all exactly the same people, but their backstories are different, and that has transformed who they are and how they react to the world around them. Roshar is similar, yet wildly different, as this was before I brought in the spren as a major world element.

If you’re a fan of the Stormlight Archive, I think you’ll find these chapters quite interesting. The anthology also includes a lot of very cool scenes, chapters, and stories from awesome authors, so please check it out.

In Way of Kings Prime, not only did Roshar not have the spren (which is hard to even conceive of Roshar not having), but the Shattered Plains was also not a thing on that world yet--the Shattered Plains had originally been on the planet Yolen in the original draft of Dragonsteel. When Brandon was revising The Way of Kings from scratch, he felt Kaladin (then called Merrin) had taken the easy path. So the version we all know now is the hard path, after taking... well, you know Kaladin's flashbacks. It should be very interesting to see.

But I'm a bit worried it won't get funded, so take a look at it, and see if you can spare a little bit. I'm sure Rob would really appreciate it. There's only ten days left, so take a gander!