August 2010 Interview Transcript

[Morderkaine he/him]

I have transcribed most* of the interview - including um's, uh's, stuttering and other such things - that the folks in charge of The 17th Shard did back in August and placed it in a publicly viewable Google doc (the whole thing is well over 8000 words and would require 23 post to contain it on the forums). I have also posted these links over on TWG along with a link to the to the interview.

Transcript: http://tinyurl.com/17th-Shard-Transcript

Direct Link: https://docs.google.com/document/edit?id=1CLbNI75ALivItrWXy03c0Mh2ASDeF5jAV1y5eEA8Udw&hl=en_GB&pli=1#

Cleaned-Up Transcript (done by Ryan): http://www.17thshard.com/news/?p=48

*There were a couple things barely caught by the mics that I just couldn't make out as well as one case where a race from an un-published book was mentioned, the spelling of which I had to guess.

[Andrew the Great he/him]

I think I love you.

[Chaos he/him]

I do love you.

Also, for those wondering, I think the thing you were referring to were the Ke'Chan, which you got right anyways

[Morderkaine he/him]

Thank you Chaos, that was it. I thought there was probably an apostrophe but decided not to put it in given Brandon's aversion to fantasy clich

[Morderkaine he/him]

Inkthinker posted the image Brandon mentions in the interview over on TWG along with a little explanation, so I thought I'd post it over here as well.

This is the illustration he spoke about in the interview.

Brandon's initially asked me to imagine the world as a combination of a desert badlands and an above-ground coral reef. Much of his initial references involved branch coral or plate coral, but while looking around I also discovered brain coral. Brain coral has twisting patterns of evenly shaped and spaced valleys, and I imagined trying to walk across something like this, always having to jump chasms or backtrack, never being able to travel in a straight line.

The actual Shattered Plains in the book are more like a dropped plate of glass. The shapes of the plateaus are irregular and the chasms deeper and more varied, the tops less flat and even. But the basic idea  is pretty interestingly similar. Brandon had never described the Plains to me, and I never read Dragonsteel. I was just running with the "above-ground coral reef" design mandate, and hit upon a convergent concept unrelated to his initial draft.

So, imagining it like a labyrinth of chasms topped by a plains-like surface (composed largely of the hiding grass and rough coral/anemone/seaweed-like plants), I thought that perhaps the Highstorms don't necessarily ravage the bottoms of the crevasses (unless the wind turns just right or a flash-flood clears it all out) the way they do the surface. So while the tops of the Plains are scoured of all but the toughest plants, the chasms themselves are teeming with life.  Water collects in the low places and creates misty, swampy territory. Tiny cremlings chitter and vinebuds wave their faintly luminescent tendrils in the moist air.

It's hard for me to say how much of what appears in the book comes from just a handful of rough doodles. I had a very loose idea that looked very different, and what ultimately appears in the novels is far better than I had imagined. It's an environment I hope we get to explore more thoroughly.