Chaos

In a few short hours, the sixth Mistborn novel, The Bands of Mourning, will be available for everyone to read. Our Bands forum will allow full spoilers for the book tonight. Get excited. You can read our review of Bands here. Below we'll discuss about our spoiler policies for this novel. But, there's something more. As we all know, there is always another secret, and with Brandon, that secret is, of course, a secret project. It is also coming out tonight on ebook formats alongside Bands. It's called Mistborn: Secret History, which Brandon revealed on Reddit after Amazon leaked its existence. Secret History is an ebook novella (and you can find it on Amazon yourself) and it will be on all ebook platforms tonight. It is not coming out February as the Amazon listing suggests. (It will be on iBooks tonight, but when that entry appears, you'll be able to buy it immediately. No preordering there, apparently.) This novella is especially long, at 50,000 words. Just so you know, that's half the length of Shadows of Self, or one-fourth of the first Mistborn book. That's pretty big. Secret History will eventually have a print edition in a cosmere novella anthology, which Brandon hopes will be out this fall. That anthology will have an audio version. There will probably be a standalone print copy of Secret History, in the vein of the Shadows for Silence book, but not until that anthology has been out for "a few years," says Brandon. What is Secret History about? I'll just let Brandon say, as he said on Reddit: I'm going to say this a bit more forcefully than Brandon, but: do not read Mistborn: Secret History until you have read Bands. The preface of Secret History will make this clear...If you're curious about the background of Secret History, this was initially to be a total secret and for it to come out at the same time as Bands, but Amazon did leak its page. It's a thing that exists, but we aren't going to tell you what it is. If you want a mini review, here's one: it is a totally insane, extremely special thing that you should read immediately (after Bands) if you love Mistborn. Forum Spoiler Policies At 12:01am tonight, Mountain Time, our Bands of Mourning spoiler board will open up for full book discussion. Why this time zone? Because the midnight release is in Provo, Utah, and it seemed the most sensible time to "start" the book. You'll know when this happens because you'll see a topic called "Bands of Mourning Book Reactions [bands Spoilers]" pinned at the top, and you'll be able to add posts there. At the same time, there will be another subforum, the Mistborn: Secret History board, that will be open and you will be able to discuss that there--though we will judge you if you go here before finishing Bands. Here's how spoilers are going to go. We need to be especially strict this time around. -You must discuss Bands and Secret History in their respective subforums. Do not even use the usual spoiler tags to discuss these books in any other place on the forum. -Topic titles should not have spoilers (be as vague as possible!) and should either contain the text "[bands Spoilers]" or "[secret History Spoilers]". The reason for this is that, though these topics will be in the Bands or Secret History subforums, they appear in the Recent Topics ticker on the forum home as well as the site home page. Topic titles also appear in the View New Content ability. So, because of this, you will need to be vague about this. Having these tags should make it clear to people who pass across the titles that they should not click those links. -If there happens to be overlap between Bands and Secret History and you want to discuss both, use the Secret History board. We will be using these guidelines in ultra-strict mode for the first two weeks of release. We're super serious about this, and if you break this or spoil stuff because you made an extremely poor choice in a topic title, we'll probably put you in a moderation queue, or worse. A moderation queue is a thing where, if we put you there, we will need to manually check all your posts before they will appear to the populace. If spoilers are really bad, it might be grounds to a ban. Let's just keep these guidelines in mind and I'm sure it will go fine! After February 9th--two weeks after Bands and Secret History are public--we will be exiting ultra-strict spoiler police mode and reverting to our usual policy. You will be able to mention Bands or Secret History spoilers outside of their respective subboards only with use of the spoiler tags. If your entire topic is a spoiler, you must still put them in the subboards. You should also keep using the [bands Spoilers] or [secret History Spoilers]. It will be about six months after release when the subforums disappear (as we did with Words of Radiance) and we exit the main spoiler period. To be clear on spoiler tags, the easiest way is to simply type this: [spoiler](Write spoilers here)[/spoiler] I also want to talk about Cosmere Theories. In the past, we have been lax regarding spoiler topics in the Cosmere Theories board and allowing people to have spoiler heavy book discussion (of a primarily cosmere nature) there right at release. We're going to be more strict now, and so the "ultra-strict" mode still applies in Cosmere Theories. Post the relevant topics in the subboards. On February 9th, you can post spoilery cosmere topics in the Cosmere Theories board, so long as you still adhere to the topic titling guidelines. If you would like, we can move cosmere-heavy topics in the Bands or Secret History subforum to Cosmere Theories on February 9th. I hope you are as excited for Bands and Secret History as we are. (You should be.) We hope with these guidelines, if you haven't read these first thing, you can still use the forum effectively. Enjoy, everyone. One final note: Splintercast Reads Shadows of Self will return on Wednesday, rather than its usual Tuesday, because tomorrow, you probably should go read some new Brandon Sanderson-y goodness. But don't worry, Alyx will return soon. She is also going to have Splintercasts for Bands and Secret History, so there will be plenty of screaming to hear for you. I hear some of her reactions on Bands have been particularly awesome...

This week, Brandon posted a large progress report on Oathbringer, the third Stormlight Archive book, on the Stormlight Archive subreddit. To talk about how far he has gotten, he went into a detailed explanation on how he structures Stormlight books, so people understand what his word count means. I'm going to talk about what Brandon said, and do some analysis as well! Long story short, Brandon is 180,000 words through Oathbringer. (For comparison, the first Mistborn book is about 200,000 words long.) 130,000 of those are for Part One of the book. Like the other Stormlight books, this will have five parts, and Brandon said that Part One will be longest. He's also written Dalinar's flashbacks in its entirety. Most interestingly, he's finished a novelette from a new character that we will see in Part Two of the book, and he's partially through the novelette that will be in the vein of Szeth and Eshonai interludes. Confused yet? To truly understand what that means, Brandon talked about the structure of the book, as Stormlight books have a particular structure to them. Each Stormlight book has a central "focus" character which has a big arc with flashbacks. The Way of Kings had Kaladin, and Words of Radiance had Shallan. In the initial work on the flashbacks for this book, Brandon decided on Dalinar--before, he didn't know whether Dalinar or Szeth would get the flashbacks. After he decided on Dalinar, he finished Dalinar's flashbacks in entirety. While Dalinar gets a larger plot in this book, Brandon did say that we will see Kaladin and Shallan on the level that we saw Kaladin in Book Two. The flashback character gets a role in all five Parts of the book, so we'll see a lot of Dalinar. In addition, we of course have the interludes in between each of the five Parts of the book. There are two different kinds of interludes: ones that are short stories, and then a recurring interlude character in what Brandon calls a novelette. The recurring characters in interludes were Szeth and Eshonai. Book three is going to introduce a new viewpoint for the interludes here, which he hasn't finished writing. Brandon restricts the amount of viewpoint characters carefully in this way so he doesn't have the problems of other huge fantasy series--like, say, The Wheel of Time--where we just lose sight of the main characters. In addition to Dalinar, Kaladin, and Shallan, we'll also see some Szeth, Eshonai (to no one's surprise, she's alive), Adolin, Jasnah, and Navani. What interests me most is that Part Two has a second novelette from a character we haven't seen viewpoints from yet. This person's viewpoints will be across six chapters in Part Two. Because of this, Part Two actually has the least amount of focus on the main characters, though Brandon said that Part Two is shorter than Part One. Like the first two Stormlights, Oathbringer's Part Five is very short as well. If you think this all sounds confusing, so did I at first. My reaction to that sentence was, "Man, it sounds like we really need a spreadsheet to visualize this." Well, the joke's on me, because that's exactly what Brandon did. (And people make fun of me for using a spreadsheet to outline my books! Well, take this!) I have to imagine that in Brandon's actual spreadsheet or outline, these names are actual characters. We have "Flashbacks" and "Primary Character" which of course refer to Dalinar. Secondary Main Character 1 and 2 are surely Kaladin and Shallan, respectively. Perhaps I am reading too much into the coloring (entirely possible!), but considering Kaladin is a Windrunner, associated with blue, and Shallan is a Lightweaver, associated with red, we could say that Shallan is Secondary Main Character 1, and Kaladin is Secondary Main Character 2. It is interesting that Secondary Main Character 2 vanishes in Part Four, and that in Part Two, we only get one chapter from Secondary Main Character 1. This isn't that unusual. In The Way of Kings, Shallan totally disappeared from Parts Two and Four, and Dalinar and Adolin weren't in Parts One and Three. In Words of Radiance, Dalinar had much fewer viewpoints than in Book One. So, don't be concerned that you won't see your favorite character for a while. Brandon's been doing this juggling the whole time. For tertiary characters, this is kind of interesting. Brandon does explicitly mention--as I did above--that we will see "moderate amounts" of Szeth, Eshonai, Jasnah, Adolin, and Navani. That's five characters, but on this spreadsheet we only have four tertiary characters. Perhaps this means one of these five will be people we see, but not get viewpoints from. As for Adolin, Brandon later confirmed that Adolin won't have as many viewpoints as other main characters. He will be in about as much as he had in the first two books. That's about it from the big characters. Brandon did also said there will be "a few surprises regarding other characters who have slightly larger places in the plot," but anyone not on that list won't have more than a viewpoint occasionally. At least, until the second five books, where we will have a different set of main characters--of which Renarin is one of them. So that's pretty cool. Next on the writing agenda for Oathbringer is to revise Part One, which he normally doesn't do, but he wants to make sure continuity is correct before he moves on. From there, he plans to write Dalinar's Part Two segments, mixing in the flashbacks and the Part Two novelette, and getting the rest of Part Two's main characters done. He hopes that this will put Part Two to 70,000 words, which will put the book at 200,000 words--right at the halfway mark! Brandon's certainly got his work cut out for him on books this huge. I am really appreciative of him updating us on his progress, and he's clearly working hard. But seriously, there's so many characters and plotlines that no wonder these books are a massive undertaking! I've also compiled a bunch of things Brandon has said on Reddit and Facebook regarding this. I've integrated a few quotes into what is above, but here are some others: Well. That's a thing. I mean, Brandon has said that main characters can die, and has said this frequently. But "spoilers about the nature of the back five books"? Please let me travel in time to discover this now. Brandon clarified that he means that Hoid hasn't missed a main sequence cosmere book. There were some other writing-related comments, which you can check out by looking at the full Reddit thread. One last thing that I thought I'd mention. An AutoModerator bot on the Stormlight subreddit actually flagged Brandon's post because: "Your submission has been automatically removed because the title does not include one of the required tags." Fortunately, Brandon was able to approve it himself, since he's a moderator of the subreddit. What a cheater.