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Yesterday I had lunch with Brandon. We have answers to most of the questions brought to the interview thread, a few were RAFOs so we don't have answers for those, but the rest we basically do. ^.^ Also, there was a reading of part of the first Kaladin chapter of WoR as well as a reading from Shadows of Self revealing the contents received in a book at the end of Alloy. EDIT:: Apparently the Alloy reading isn't new. xP These will be posted later today. Recordings can be found here. The second part of the interview is still processing.

When I asked this of Brandon he got really excited and said it was a good question, but it wasn't Nightblood. This leads me to think it's a different Awakened sword.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NC5Sfu3uFo4mKqhCri1ElDnxnWJKDBB2IBQC7EmUpRI/edit The transcription of the interview has begun...

I'm hesitant to start meta-ing Sanderson, but given the trends, it seems unlikely Calamity (assuming it's responsible) is a being of simple evil. Recalling the ideals of David's father, it seems likely that what the plot is working towards is a good Epic, through means currently unknown. The primary question is why does using power cause the side effect of arrogance? Operating under the idea that this magic system is grounded in fantasy-science. No demons influencing the pure human minds here. Calamity is an entity related to the powers, but presumably has little to do with the eventual ripples through society. 1) Floating thing in ths sky = ALIENS 2) It's hinted that researchers caused this to begin with. So they probably caused Calamity too... Space- virus - vector ? The fact we can see it during day (and during nightwielder's night) suggests it's pretty close to earth, close enough to sprinkle some special genetic fairy dust. GIven the general 'science' aspect of the superpowers, it probably isn't just a magical light that shines through because magic. 3) It's suggested that a genetic change was caused in the Epics by Calamity... but, the red thing is still in the sky. Why is it still there? Would taking it away remove the powers? Is Calamity constantly maintaining the Epic's powers? +The Prof's "inventions" have been shown to be a gifting of his powers, so it's entirely possible the green-laser-ray and other such pieces of "technology" are also just stored bits of power. +Still, scientists are collecting Epic DNA. If they cannot use it to produce epic-tech, then I'd assume they are looking for markers that explain why certain people are affected, and perhaps why it causes a personality change. Secret unknown labs somehow operating under the noses of the Epics sounds kind of sinister. Could an Epic be sponsoring the research?

I'm going to doublepost here. There were a couple questions asked off recording while we were eating: Is Hoid's sword in WoK Nightblood? That's a really good question, but no it isn't. Can Hoid hear the Shards? He can't necessarily hear them all the time, but he has interacted with them all and knows them all personally.

The "Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven?" line wasn't a question. lol. I was counting out loud. Thank you fro doing the transcription Weiry. Upvote for you.

- For no reason whatsoever all scientists will start treating Shallan like the smartest person they have ever met after making Shallan a prisoner. - Lamarill didn't die, he switched bodies with Matal. - Noone has any respect for anyone else. - When Shallans opinion doesn't happen to coincide with Jasnahs, Jasnah will believe it's because of a mystical twist of destiny, not just her own conclusions. - The descendants of the Wandersails crew will not believe or respect anything the Rosharans deem important and vice versa. - Moash will start hearing the thoughts of cremlings in his mind and will mope about it for 8 out of 10 books. - Teft knows everything about the Knights Radiant, he just doesn't fell like sharing. - Some woman will show up suddenly, who is known by all other women, yet was never contacted until about the 5th book. She will call anyone "boy", "daughter" or "child" whenever she wants to put them in their place Just as a sidenote, i loved WoT, I just found some parts of it extremely aggravating.

I think it's common knowledge by now that Demoux, Galladon, and some random dude who's probably from Warbreaker 2 show up in The Way of Kings. I have no clue why Galladon chose to run off and join the Hunt for the HoidTM, but I do have my guess as to why Demoux joined the team. At the end of The Hero of Ages, Demoux has what every side character dreams of. He has one of the most broken superpowers ever, the knowledge that his idol is watching over him, and a road named after him. So why would he want to head to Roshar and try to find Hoid? Because his love interest told him to. Aslydin is Demoux's love interest from The Hero of Ages. It's okay if you don't remember her, because she doesn't have a single line of dialogue in the whole trilogy. She was hanging out at the Pits of Hathsin, and Demoux fell in love with her. Demoux is a very loyal character, so I don't think he'd be the type to go and abandon his wife. Therefore, I believe that Aslydin was a member of the Seventeenth Shard, and she was on Scadrial looking for Hoid. Because Hoid left Scadrial, she had to leave as well, but she offered Demoux the chance to come with her. He took it, and the two of them went to chase Hoid. Brandon did say in the Q&A that there were worldhopping characters in the earlier books, but they weren't supposed to be identified. Aslydin fits the bill. Also, it's possible that Galladon was recruited immediately after Hoid left Sel, as they were there at the same time. What do you think?

So we were having a discussion about the cryptics in the "Symbol Heads" thread and I hit on an idea that I hadn't heard anyone toss out yet. Now don't scream and fuss about this idea to much. I know it is thin and the evidence is thin as well. But, I don't know of anything that particularly speaks against it. As a preface to this, I have heard people grumble about the fact that it appears that all the Main characters so far (Dalinar, Kaladin, Shallan, and Jasnah) are on the road to radianthood. I myself personally thought that this was kind of a bit damp. It seemed like it would be nice if one of these four went astray or was not on the path. This idea may appeal to those who share this sentiment. So, the prevailing thought about the cryptics is that they are the bonding spren responsible for Shallan's soulcasting ability. However, by all appearances, the cryptics have different symbols in place of heads. Now this could simply be individuality, but Brandon indicated that we may recognize these symbols, though they are not glyphs. What if these symbols indicated separate classifications or orders of cryptics? Now, clearly, Syl is not a cryptic and she is the right kind of spren to associate Kaladin with the Windrunner order of the KR. This could mean that the cryptics are not associated with the KR. What orders then would the cryptics be associated with? What if the cryptics were associated with voidbinding? Could the symbols be the ones we see in the back cover lining chart? This may explain Jasnah's concern at seeing the picture of the cryptic.

not the same, but:

It's not one code, one thing unlocked for one person. It's more along the lines of many codes together can unlock new content that is available to anyone who has one of the codes.

Then this still doesn't solve the mass problem. Assuming that storing health gives you the ability to turn back the clock, so to speak, then where does the second arm come from to replace the one on the ground in front of you? Or to use a less extreme example, where did Wayne's second back come from?

At the risk of thread necromancy, I'm completely sure that Baxil's mistress is Shalash/Shash after getting that question confirmed.

There's plenty of room this Monday. I'll put you down for the 30th.

I tried really hard to get him to answer the Seon question, I really did! xD

I've finished the transcribing the interview. So many things... I'm surprised he didn't just RAFO the atium/worldhopping question and I'm shocked to find out the Lord Ruler did not use lerasium... I'm a little bummed that he didn't answer my seon question but to be fair it wasn't particularly clear. I should have phrased it as "When King Raoshem settled in Elantris and made it his capital, did seons exist?" Also he wasn't clear on whether he was RAFOing or PAFOing the calender question... Terriswoman worldhopper... I wonder if she is Demoux's wife/lover-person-thing. And it is real bummer that we won't get the annotations for a long time but oh well...

Alright. I'm done with the Kaladin reading. Let me know if you find any mistakes. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VkGVO97Yq_sw3dV63j0BRw181MoIFvH_QKAYl0WU--w/edit?usp=sharing

Jasnah wasn't a viewpoint character in TWoK's. Cryptics are invisible. Jasnah is a scholar. Their are any number of ways that Jasnah could have recognized the symbol. People soulcast without cryptics. Szeth surgebinds without a spren. We have no evidence Jasnah's cryptic exists yet. When the evidence is shaky, and it is, we can assume whatever we want. It doesn't make it true, but we can make the assumption. To be clear I should have said something along the lines of 'lets assume' because I don't know that Jasnah is without a cryptic just because Shallan didn't draw a picture of it. If she does have a cryptic, this just means that she is even more likely to be heading down the same path, or a similar path of power as Shallan. This is what I was trying to get at when you nit picked one sentence out of my post to choose as your starting point. I'm of the opinion that Jasnah and Shallan are both firmly in Cultivations sphere of influence. But, if what they were doing was void bringing, then we can't just point at Shallan. Both of them are using soulcasting, and both of them have the same physical requirements to use their powers. The difference between what they do and what Kaladin does is as clear as the difference between Alomancers and Feromancers. It is also possible that Odium steals. If Szeth is using Odiums system, is it a copy of Honors? Did he copy Cultivations as well? If he did, then we actually have more reason to suspect Jasnah of using Odiums system than we do Shallan. Szaeth doesn't have any spren, Shallan has a spren of some type. We don't know that Jasnah has a spren, we don't know that she doesn't. As far as I can tell I was speculating broadly. I'm really not sure what you're talking about. Please feel free to list these assumptions of mine individually and I will be happy to address them. Or, she could be using Odiums power and desires to corrupt Shallan. She could be curious. She could have drank too much wine and had faulty judgement at the time, you're right, we don't know. We haven't seen anything from Jasnah's viewpoint at all in TWoK's. We did see Shallan's viewpoint though. She isn't callous, she has a high regard for life, she feels regret for some of the things she has done, she doesn't appear to crave power for the sake of power. This doesn't sound like Odium to me. Not when we have characters like Sadeas that would make a far better subject for Odium. Sadeas is callous, he doesn't have regard for the lives of his peers, he treats his soldiers as tools, and he treated his bridgemen even worse. As I've said, Shallan has faults, but from what we have seen of her character, her personality, she doesn't seem like she would be attracting Odiums spren (If he even has any). This may or may not be true. You yourself pointed out the scarcity of hard facts in this area in the OP. Everything here is speculation based on very limited information. The symbols on the chart are stylized to some degree. The sword glyph on the cover is different from the glyph on its chart. They have the same basic shape, but if you didn't know it was the same shape it would be easy to miss. Taking a three dimensional symbol that fills the space of a persons head and translating that into a two dimensional symbol would require a simplification of the form. I wouldn't write your theory off entirely based on that quote. A stick figure may represent a person, but it certainly doesn't look like a person.

Being a. From another country b. In yet another country c. Without friends that share my interest in fantasy literature (in *any* country) (mostly) d. a Ebook user (got Steelheart just a minute after midnight in Pacific Standard) I find myself unable to participate in Steelhunt, which is mildly aggravating. While posting in the thread is obviously against the rules (the posts are publicly visible), I think that some system of distributing the codes over PMs would be nice, be it just "receiver sends 3 PMs to random members" or something like contests/rolls or whatnot.

We know Honour survived until well after the breaking of the oathpact as well, because most of Dalinars visions are more recent than that, and Honour tells him that they are mostly things Honour saw and the only one we know that isn't true of is the last one in which Honour in forms him of this.

That is my finest demonstration of ninja skills yet . Preempted two with one blow, the first by 4 hours and the second by 6.6 hours .

As people have said, the ecological impanct could be 'magical' rather than food chain related. I am sure it is said somewhere that the highstorms are getting more violent and powerful, what if this is related to the fall in the number of pupating chasmfiends? RANDOM THEORY TIME... YAY! What if the chasmfieds pupation acted as a sort of release valve for the stormlight in the highstorms so that by the time the highstorm got passed the shatterend plains, the storm was diminished slightly due to the pupating chasmfiends. Therefore, as the chasmfiends are killed (and not pupating) they are not taking any stormlight out of the storms and therefore the storms are feeling more powerful once they hit the rest of the continent. In this theory, the population of the chasm fiends is proportional to the ferocity of the highstorms. Of course this assumes that: 1. There is a finite amount of stormlight in a hightorm 2. That the ferocity of the highstorm is proportional to the amount of stormlight in it. 3. That the highstorms are not actually getting more powerful, it just appears that way. 4. That the stormlight required to pupate the chasmfiend is pretty massive (enought to affect the total amount in a highstorm) I quite like thiss though. It seems like a pretty good adaptation for a species living closest to the origin, where the storms are strongest.

I don't know who nega-voted it, but have an upvote... that's very interesting and will impact on a lot of our thinking. EDIT: Something has just occurred to me. While Rashek was playing around with the Well, the general pattern was that he kept creating problems, but as he became more skilful he created smaller and smaller problems. What does this say about his self-rewrite? Did he screw himself up in some way, or is the well more easily used (in an intuitive understanding kind of sense, rather than a power kind of sense) to rewrite one's sDNA (which there is some hint of, given that condensed Well when burned has this effect) than it is to, say... move the planet around?

TLR did not use a bead of lerasium to become an Allomancer. (Yes, I'm glad that I was right.)

Oh no, I didn't mind or anything. You did a rocking job, and got me a laugh at the same time. It just seemed ironic, you know?

*Shrug* A lot of the people around are newer and I don't know everyone's specific idiosyncrasies and your name was the first that popped up when I was trying to think of who asked it, since I hadn't put names with questions (which was silly of me.)

The conversation I had with Brandon was "Do not post codes on the site(17th Shard.) Make the other Sharders work for their codes. So someone saying, "I have a code, who wants it?" would be essentially the same thing, which would ruin the spirit of he event. You can send it to as many people as you want, so if you wanted to go through and PM everyone you are friends with a code, that would essentially be OK. But posting a code or that you have one and asking who wants it would be violating the spirit of the event and would end up with things like people having to have their picture with their code before their code was activated manually.

Sounds good - I will wait (im)patiently for further news.

So yesterday at the steelheart signing in orem I asked Brandon about infinity blade. He said the game creators will do spin off games but the story is pretty much over even though Brandon set the game creators up for a really great story. If you finished IB3 you found out that a lot of questions go unanswered and it leaves you feeling very anticlimactic. So Brandon didn't mind telling me about what he imagined for the characters. The worker was definitely an ancient deathless from like Egyptian times and he liked to wipe them away and present himself as the elder deathless. Ausar was from the ancient world also created around the same time. Brandon said he wanted to go more into depth with that sorry but that the game creators ultimately got to have final say and were trying to make a game not a story. But cool that Brandon was willing to share

Yeah, probably >.>' My bad. lol.

I do want to clarify that he didn't request that we be called the 17S. When we went to him originally it was with the name of "Hoid's Compendium", and we explained that the reason we chose that was because Hoid was a world hopper and represented all of Brandon's works. He then said that Hoid wasn't the best example, but rather there was an orinization of world hoppers. He also said even back then that there were world hoppers in the books that had time on screen, but we wouldn't realize they were from another world without seeing the book or scenes from their point of view, so there is that....

Uploads are to be had. ^.^

Oh, it looks like there was one of that already. I had somehow missed that before. It looks like that one is a little longer than the reading he did yesterday, but it looks like there's a couple places there are words msissing so that will be good. I'll post them here soon, as soon as I can get a hold of my friend's phone that we used for he recordings. (He should be over soon.

Would you guys prefer me to soundcloud them, then work on a transcription after the fact, or wait until I've transcribed them to soundcloud them?

You seem like you are the on that is on the ball in this forum, haha. BUT! A quote that suggests we haven't seen what they start out as does not imply they aren't connected at all. There could be a stage right in between Parshendi body and Chasmfiend body, and there could be a stage before Parshendi that is the starting point. Both scenarios would allow for this quote from Brandon without it appearing misleading. I mean, where the Parshendi come from (although we know they do mate) is also a mystery to us right now. Technically we have not seen what they start out as either. Could be the same.

As always Brandon has left me wanting a sequel right NOW. I thought it was excellent. Mcmillion, I can see how the formula looks similar to mistborn. But let's try to give Sanderson a little credit. After all not a single one of us nailed the "theory of weakness". Things never end up being exactly as they appear. I'm willing to bet that Calamity is more unique than just being a ruin clone. Edit: I'm also betting there is a reason their powers twist their minds. Although I'm sure that particular mystery won't be solved until the 3rd book.

I don't think Urithiru went to the Shattered Plains from Shadesmar. I think it was the Shattered Plains all along. First, yes, I'm counting on Jasnah's notes on a mistranslation that the word was never meant to be "westward". Maybe it wasn't even a direction, maybe it was to be "placed quickly" or something. Second, I'm thinking about "the place nearest to Honor" I'm gonna get a little Cosmere up in here, so bear with me: (Spoilers below for other books in the cosmere. First, Mistborn) (Spoilers for Warbreaker) So. Where is nearest to Honor in Roshar? Where then is Honor's body? If you didn't read the above, my basic point is that "the place nearest" a god is where that god's body is produced. A god's body is integral to the world's system of magic. It is a thing very much like a natural substance, but different in some important way, and it grows back. It isn't Stormlight. That's simply the energy of Surgebinding. What is the catalyst? Gems. And what gems are very much LIKE other gems, but clearly different in some fundamental way? Which gems grow? Which gems can be constantly harvested? Gemhearts. All greatshells produce gemhearts. But where are the biggest? Where are the ones all of Alethi are astounded to see? The Chasmfiends of the Shattered Plains. The beings that the Parshendi, with their poor grasp of the Alethi tongue, call Gods. Or maybe... the body of God? I think West is a mistranslation. (Spoiler for Mistborn) I think that Urithiru was placed nearest Honor, which means the place that the Chasmfiends gather, which is the Shattered Plains. What I frankly think is most likely is that the plains were never shattered. I agree with the theory that they're just covered in crem. Dalinar himself on the Tower commented that it looked like a field of low walls, covered in snow. That got me thinking... what if someone saw a field covered in snow... and Soulcast the snow into stone? Wouldn't that be what this looked like? Maybe it's crem from the storms. Maybe it's Soulcasting. I don't know. What I do believe, however, is that the city of Urithiru is, and always was, at the Shattered Plains. Which were never actually Shattered.

I mean, I bet there is some crazy money in getting your YA dystopian superhero trilogy turned into a movie after Hunger Games and Avengers. Can't blame the man for prioritizing it if his publishers think he has the next big thing. It's not like we're going anywhere.