Era 3 idea

[Windborn_bolder]

At one point the main character was a nicroburst and there was a mistborn serial killer. What if they were using the nicroburst to attract the Mistborn because he only had the original eight powers.

[Treamayne]

3 hours ago, Windborn_bolder said:

At one point the main character was a nicroburst and there was a mistborn serial killer. What if they were using the nicroburst to attract the Mistborn because he only had the original eight powers.

That is no longer the plan for Era 3. She will still be a main character - but "allomantic SWAT Team hunts killers" idea has been changed because it is too close to what was done in Era 2 (that was the plan before AoL became a whole new Era). WoB:

Spoiler

Quote

Argent

You've dropped a few tidbits about the plot of the next Mistborn series over the years. Putting all those things together, we have a nicrosil Ferring Terriswoman hacker recruited for fieldwork in an "Allomancer SWAT team" to chase a Mistborn serial killer. Could you give us a more recent and concise pitch/blurb if the above is no longer accurate?

Brandon Sanderson

Ha. That's not far off, as all of those things still exist in the series, though the weight I'll give them is relative. With the Alloy series covering some of the police procedural aspect of storytelling, I'm inching the outlines slowly away from the SWAT idea and toward more spy thriller--but the SWAT team isn't not gone completely. (Of course, who knows what will happen in the intervening years between now and when I write it.)

Stormlight Three Update #4 (Oct. 4, 2016)

Quote

Windrunner

Another sort of meta question: we were just wondering, you know, how are things going with the Ghostbloods? You know, having a good time, is there anything that's kind of particularly exciting or challenging about kind of returning to this world since Wax and Wayne was unplanned, you know, and now you're coming back to something that you've had in your mind for a while?

Brandon Sanderson

Man, it has been so nice to have had Wax and Wayne. A lot of the stuff that I did in Wax and Wayne is stuff that, in this book, I would have had to do as setup, which has made this book streamline a lot better. We don't have to delve as much into these things; if you want to find out-- if you want to read them, they're in the Wax and Wayne books. If you don't want to read the Wax and Wayne books, then I think this book will still work, but having it there just as this four-book basically history to make this all happen means that I don't have to set up the cold war, I don't have to set up the Bands of Mourning and the strife over those, there's just so many things I don't have to do that as I'm writing this book, I'm like, "Oh, I covered that already; oh, I covered that already, I don't have to do that!" and it's making the write of the book just a lot easier. My biggest concern with it right now is everybody wants this to be a new entry point to Mistborn, right? And I find it clunky to reexplain in these characters viewpoints key ideas from the Mistborn series, and I don't know how well it's going to work for new readers, right? I don't want to delve into what is Allomancy, what is Feruchemy, and kind of, you know, the 101 level stuff, and I'm going to have to see how that flies with initial readers, but it doesn't feel natural in the flow of the text. And maybe I'll find a place to make it natural in the flow of the text and, you know, for marketing purposes, Tor and everyone wants this to be Ghostbloods book 1, not Mistborn book 8, right? But it's Mistborn book 8, I mean, you know? I've been writing in this world for a long time; I'm very comfortable with things and, you know, it's more fun for me to have, for instance, a Lurcher character doing cool things with their powers than it is for me to reexplain how Allomancy works. It's more like, "let's show some Mistings you haven't seen before and see what they can do," and that's fun. So, I'm writing it that way, and we'll see if I need to do any revisions.

Windrunner

That totally makes sense. Did they generally view Wax and Wayne as an entry point, or not so much?

Brandon Sanderson

So, here's the problem, David. And, again, this is something I did pretty eyes-open. Tom Doherty came to me--this is the CEO of Tor, founder CEO of Tor--came to me after I killed Vin and Elend and he said, "Brandon, you can't do this," before the book came out, "If you do this, then there is no series." And I'm like "Yeah, I'm going to jump forward 300 years and I'm going to write something else." And he's like, "No one will read that." And I'm like, "Yeah, but it's the story I'm telling." And to an extent he is right, right? Like, Mistborn ends and lost half the readership for Wax and Wayne, I'd guess. And, you know, that still means they sell pretty well, because Mistborn's one of the best selling books of all time, but you know, this huge falloff, those things terrify publishers. Where I'm like, "Yeah, there's a huge falloff, but suddenly it's a Western instead of a fantasy," It has a different audience, you know, and only a subset of the audience is going to want to jump to that, it's okay, I'm writing this book for them. The others, there's lots of great fantasy books for them to read, right? Not every book has to be for everyone and it's okay for readers to pick up Wax and Wayne and be like, "Eh, detective stuff, not my thing; it's a tone shift, too much of one." Not a problem with that, right? Like, I think the Wax and Wayne books are stronger-written--they get there, Alloy of Law's a little sketchy--but they're stronger written, particularly the one-two punch of Shadows of Self and Bands of Mourning as the two strongest, I think, Mistborn books by actual, like, writing. I think Mistborn 1 is just still the most appealing; it had the best premise, right, and things like that. So I think they're fantastic books, but at the same time, they're fantasy Westerns, except they're not Westerns, they're taking place in a city, so they're fantasy detective novels staring a Western character who's in the Mistborn world. They're weird!

So the publisher's just never been behind Wax and Wayne, and now I'm doing it again, and in their mind we're going to lose half our audience again, right, and that's, you know, terrifying to them that you might half you audience a second time and then he's going to do it again and again. I think we have lost who we're going to lose and I think some people might pick up Ghostbloods; urban fantasy appeals to more people than weird Western does, but this is the piece of art. This is what I'm writing, this is the fun. Mistborn will stand a test of time better because I'm doing these weird things. Same thing kind of with Wind and Truth, right, like doing weird stuff can be disastrous, but when it works you end up with things that stand the test of time. And a lot of the weird things like this, the initial reception is people are really uncertain and they're right to be really uncertain, but then it works over time. That's why I say seven or eight years will tell if that's the case and we'll see with, I think, Wax and Wayne and Ghostbloods kind of the same thing. Over a long period of time, does the fact that I have these powerful artistic inclinations to do something different, is it going to make it stand out, or is just going to be weird? So, Ghostbloods, I guess circling back, is going really well. It's, I mean, just a blast to write in the Mistborn world. It's my favorite just kind of setting to write in, because it is fun to just-- the way the 32 powers kind of crunch together in different ways is really engaging and interesting and you can do quirky things with them.

Shardcast Interview (May 25, 2025)

 

Hope that helps

Edited July 27, 2025 by Treamayne
SPAG/WoB