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Calamity Percentages


sanderfan

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Am I the only one who's slightly entertained by Brandon's very specific percentages when it comes to how far he's worked through Calamity? If I remember correctly (which is highly unlikely) it went from 2% to 3% to something like 12% (maybe) and now it's at 19%. How do you even quantify an unfinished book down to one percent?

 

Just something I noticed.

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Epic Name: Brandon Sanderson

 

Real Name: Brandon Sanderson

 

Power: Type 3 Calculating ability. Brandon Sanderson can determine the exact percentage of completion in any unfinished work.

 

Weakness: Unknown. Possibly going more than twenty-four hours without writing.

 

Modus Operandi: Driving we mere mortals mad with constant status updates as we await the conclusion to our favorite book series.

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Well, i imagine they are very rough guesses on his part. He probably knows the whole story that he wants to tell in Calamity, has likely written chapter summaries and dot-points for the whole book, and just needs to flesh it all out. Assuming he has done this, he knows roughly how much work he needs to do to accomplish a first draft, then he can estimate how much time it will take writing other drafts and editing, and finally how much time as a proportion of the whole finalizing and publishing the book will take.

 

Just guessing, of course

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  • 2 weeks later...

Now it's at 24% and I'm starting to think he's messing with us...  :ph34r:

jk, not really but I just really want it to be rounded up to 25 because I have issues.

 

Maybe Sanderson should let his fans read what he has so far and judge whether or not we think it's 24% or 25%. We'd need to read it to guess the correct percentage because shut up now is not the time for stupid questions. :ph34r::P 

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Brandon generally has a word count in mind from his outline, so I imagine he's just using his current word count and dividing by that. The actual length of said book can be more or less, but at this point, I suspect Brandon can pin it fairly well. Things change during writing, of course.

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Now it's at 24% and I'm starting to think he's messing with us...  :ph34r:

jk, not really but I just really want it to be rounded up to 25 because I have issues.

Why is it called OCD?

That name has no order. CDO. That's it. It is now in alphabetical order.

As it SHOULD BE.

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chaos already gavve you the rigth answer. he just sets up to write a book of, say, 100000 words, then if he has 24000 words written he says 24%. then he regularly overshoot his target, so sometimes you see the bar going back when he needs to add more chapters.

This. It's very simple. I open the Word doc and do a word count to see how many thousand words it is. Then I type in that number for the percentage. :)

 

For a Stormlight Archive book I divide the number by 3 or 4 to arrive at the percentage.

 

Though occasionally Brandon wants to publicly lie about the completion percentage, like when he was writing The Bands of Mourning when he should have been writing Shadows of Self. Then I just ask Brandon what number he wants me to put, and I type it in. So, when it said 50% done on Shadows of Self, this could have really meant that Shadows of Self was 40% done and The Bands of Mourning was 60% done.

Edited by PeterAhlstrom
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