kingbirdy

This is definitely a mislead - we see in one of Mr T's POVs that Malata had been working for the Diagram before she became Radiant.

It could also be that Hoid was the coachman, and was borrowing the name of someone he'd recently encountered.

I'd love to win it!

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.

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.

But the Nicrosil is clearly there for some purpose. If it wasn't needed, it wouldn't be integrated in to the coin. Perhaps it doesn't need to be explicitly tapped, but rather when in contact with a metalmind allows it to be tapped?

Ah, okay. That's more followable. Thanks! Wouldn't it have to work like that, though? I believe people besides Wayne handled the unkeyed goldmind they found, but only he could tap it - nicrosil seems to be the only difference.

Kelsier couldn't be in Spook's body, because Spook ruled for 100 years in Elendel, while Kel showed up in year 10 in southern Scadrial.

I'm really having trouble following the steps to make the medallions. Could someone lay it out simply, like Person A makes F.Nicrosil mind Person B taps A's F.Nicrosil to make F.Aluminum Or however it should be? It'd be much appreciated.

Great theory! There's also the orb the Ire have, which stores connection to Preservation (S.Connection in your notation, I suppose), which seems to store a specific, attuned Connection, not the blank kind you've mentioned, so it seems to St least be possible. Also curious as to how it was made, as the Connection device doesn't seem to match any known magic system, certainly not that of Sel.

I think Renarin will be the least trouble, unless he starts some new issues. I don't think Adolin will be discovered due to the lengths he went to to hide himself - like many things in Alethi society, I think most people will realize he did it, but with no hard proof nothing will happen. I also don't think Shallan really dislikes Renarin, it's just that she was trying to focus to figure out how to save the army from certain death, and Renarin was sitting in the corner speaking gibberish and distracting her.