kaellok

i always pronounced skaze as "ska-zuh". had a hard time figuring out what the connection was between all the words 'til i read post about adding haze and everything became clear.

Wait, seriously? I used to live there. I remember walking from our house to the Dillon's to rent a video game with my brother and older sister a few months after we moved there, and my brother's brain broke when we came across 13th dr SE intersecting with 13th dr SE.

You can put me in Seattle. That's only a little bit wrong. Can't make it too easy for the stalkers, right?

I'm very sorry about your aunt. It's so damned hard to watch someone you love waste away in a battle that cannot be won. Words are so storming inadequate sometimes. I watched my grandfather waste away from ALS. I saw my old boss's wife (one of the coolest/best people I've ever known) slowly succumb to cancer. Nothing anybody could have said to me back then would have helped, and so I'm not sure that anything I can say will help you. Just--remember her, as she was. Talk about your memories of her with friends and loved ones, to remind yourselves and each other of her. So that in a way, she'll still be around. And so that the memories can be strengthened, and you can share her with others in generations to come.

Szeth had one when he died. The world, too. I'm pretty upset at Nale for not letting Szeth just be/stay dead. The afterlife seems to be a nice place to hang around in for all eternity if you aren't a Herald. And no matter how much you like or hate Szeth, I can think that we agree that he deserves some peace, or to be removed from Roshar so he can't do anymore harm. Especially since he chose his death, but that was denied him--for so many years he chose to give up his free will and follow that of others, and then the first act he does for himself is forcibly reversed.

Same! But my favorite series is SA. Or Warbreaker if I'm in a mood and annoyed about Kaladin being in a mood and having to read about it (it doesn't have to make sense, stop judging me!). When I first read Warbreaker, I thought it was worse than Mistborn. But, after some years and multiple re-reads, I just keep liking Warbreaker more and more, while my love for Mistborn decreased ~4%.

Some of what you speculate is possible, but the rest of it doesn't match up with some things that we know (whether from in-book, or interviews/questions). Here's a few pertinent quotes: Original parties for Oathpact were Honor and Heralds only. (I've not seen any questions that expand upon this "original" phrasing. Oathpact is still in effect (possibly only because of Taln's participation). There is much and more discussion about what caused the Recreance. I remain utterly convinced that it is something completely different than Radiants finding out that the Heralds abandoned their post some hundreds or thousands of years prior. Some percentage, sure, but not en mass as they did. Such an action would be antithetical to the Windrunners in particular--surely there would have been a sizable percentage of those known for being honorable that would have kept to the ideals of honor even if the Heralds weren't true.

I don't drink coffee because I can't stand its taste (the smell is amazing, coffee-flavored things, such as cake and ice cream, are the best, but the drink itself is awful. Yes, even cut with so much sugar and creamer in varying percentages that it's not coffee anymore. I have tested extensively). I also don't drink tea, because it usually tastes like grass to me, which is also a taste I'm not overly fond of. So my caffeine intake is usually in the form of soda. I looooove me some Dr Pepper. Realizing that I needed to cut back on the soda intake, but unwilling to give up the wakeful goodness that lets me function as a human being, I started using the Mio energy flavored water things. Everything was going well. Then, this last week has been pretty brutally terrible; I thought it was because I was cramming a 40 hour week into 3 days, which involved a whole lot of waking up early and going to bed late. Today at Thanksgiving dinner, I was showing my little vial of energy water, and realized that a week ago I had bought the wrong one. The one without any caffeine at all. So the reason I've been feeling like a zombie and having major headaches wasn't due to lack of sleep and stress from work, it was withdrawal.

My friend's NaNovel this year features giant squids that are used to create a drug (it's fantasy; so far as I know, giant squids do not actually produce a chemical that acts like a narcotic when ingested by humans). And one of the characters rides around on a motorcycle. I am officially stealing this line and throwing it at her, to be included in the novel in some way, shape, or form.

I have vague recollection of there being a thread where people were trying to decide what Brandon Sanderson fans should be called, since other fandoms have names for themselves. And then someone mentioned Bandersnatch, and *bam!* done. Wish I could find the thread to share.

congrats, Kas!! I did cross the finish line, the soonest I ever have. There's a lot of...truly atrocious writing in it. And the novel is far from done. And there's absolutely no way that I would have been able to do it on my own. Not writing is super easy, especially with Fallout 4 to play and work to work, and bed to sleep in. And even if none of you can make it to my in-person write-ins, due to being in not the Seattle area, I love watching your word counts rise as I obsessively consult my writing buddy list.

I have a hard enough time with airplanes (couple hundred hours flying, and every second has been spent in stark terror and irrational confidence that the plane will crash and everyone will die). I'm not sure that I'd be able to handle leaving the atmosphere. If my choices are a one-way ticket to Mars without my friends, or death, then I'd die every time. Bless all those that actually do want to explore the solar system and galaxy and make it possible. They're needed for humanity to survive. But I am not one of them.

You get so many storming e-cookies for this. I can't--no. Don't feel bad. Don't be ashamed. You're a flipping hero. I don't even care that you're a spider THAT OH MY GOD A SPIDER BURN IT WITH FIRE WITH FIIIRRE ALL THE FIRE HOLY CRAP RUN THAT SPIDER IS HUGE AND WE NEED MORE FIRE MORE FIRE BURN BURN BURN because this takes so much. You don't need to know what is wrong to start to get help. You just have to realize that something is. That's why you went to someone else. I have some vague idea of how to build a house, because I feel I have some vague idea of how to do literally everything; that doesn't mean that I'd try to build a house or perform surgery without someone else helping. And hey, if all you can do is blubber incoherently at someone because you can't stop crying, that's a really strong symptom and gives them a place to start from! Much better than trying to guess what it might actually be. So you were actually really smart. Take some giant poster board and bright markers and write, "YOU ROCK!" on it and tape it to your wall or door or somewhere where you'll see it when you wake up every day and go to bed at night (or not, I don't know, I just pretend and act like I know everything). Tell yourself that you do. Take it from someone who knows--me. I don't need to know anything else about you than just that line I quoted. That's all anyone should need to know to know that you're awesome. (Every storming word in this post is true and heart-felt, except for the bit about spiders. I like spiders. They eat bugs I hate. I just have this really terrible reaction to seeing them, because my brain says that spiders must be cleansed from the world using fire.)

Quite the opposite, I think. As I understand it, anarchists would prefer there to be no government. Sanderson usually has some alternative government that's trying to supplant the other one (for good or ill). Rather, Sanderson seems to be an advocate for government that is responsive to the will and desire of the people. A government that is incapable of change and protecting the people rather than feeding off of them are the ones that tend to fall. Also, I'm trying to avoid any details, because otherwise every other sentence would be spoilered. So while there are exceptions to what I just said that may seem glaring on the surface, dig a little deeper and I would disagree with you whole-heartedly, and leave it at that.

Midnight ramblings follow: We know that there's an afterlife in the Cosmere, and that sometimes just because you died doesn't mean you really died. What if the "spark of death itself" it turned from its opposite because it's specifically referring to precognition from powered from the transition from life to after-life? Precognition is an interesting thing to think about, and hard to fully grasp just because it's so alien to how we actually perceive and interact with the world. If the afterlife is a truly timeless existence that's all peace and happiness, etc., then it's quite likely that this realm would exist outside of our own space-time; so, seeing glimpses of what will happen in the near/far future/past seems not just plausible, but probable. The way the Unmade is able to catch these glimpses would seem to support this. Warbreaker spoilers And so it's blatantly clear: I would suggest that everyone in the Cosmere has the opportunity to see something as they cross from life to death. Circumstances and individual may change whether they actually do or not--and special circumstances may change whether anything can be done about it. Edit: made some edits.

I'm super-amazed that you are able to get such a high percentage of acceptable words even when writing quickly! Even when I'm under no sort of time constraints, I'm usually lucky if 50% of what I started with is kept by the time I'm done. It didn't seem as if any of you are in the Seattle region, or at least not those that shared your names. But I'm here, over on the East side, and we have some of the best write-ins open to the public (and that's not just me saying it; other people say it, too! ) At one we had tonight, our group had a cumulative of over 30k words written from 7pm-10pm. Lots of fun and encouragement was had by all. Even if you aren't in the Seattle region (clearly the best region in the world, but I understand some people prefer weather that doesn't consist of "wet" or "humid"), write-ins are absolutely the way to go if you are lacking in words. Remember it's a marathon, not a sprint, and it doesn't matter where you place. Just running it at all is worthwhile.

Give your characters goals, things that they want to achieve. Have them work towards those goals. Whenever they get close, drop something on them to keep them from achieving their goal. If you want to be particularly mean, allow them to achieve their goal--only to realize that that was a really bad idea (for the character). I mean, maybe you want to overthrow the evil god-like ruler of your planet. There's probably lots of smaller things you'd want to do first. And you're sure to have challenges along the way. And success will not necessarily look like you thought it would at all. (Seriously, though. Heist stories tend to do an incredibly good job of showcasing plot and what it is. Mistborn does the same thing, but does a significantly better job of hiding it than, say, Ocean's 11-27 do. Or however many of those movies there actually were.)

One week in! How goes the writing? I figured that maybe you all could use a bit of an inspirational hoo-ah post! God knows I do, and things are actually going well for me (aside from finishing moving just in time for Nano to start and being sick since the 30th.) And so this post is for me, really, because I'm an egomaniac and so everything important relates to me in an important way. But I'm hoping that it'll help you guys, too. I'm currently averaging ~2500 words per day. ~2250 of them are awful terrible words. The remaining ~250 words aren't especially great. If they were all together, they would be, I'm sure. Alas, I'll have a sentence here, a few words in a sentence there. It's disheartening. BUT! A friend of mine is helping me to keep it all in perspective, with a trick of her own. "I'm just thinking of it as a very detailed outline." She's very wise. Even in the scenes where things aren't working the way that they should, or when the language and words that I'm choosing to use are just atrocious, I'm able to put my head down and bullrush through them because I know that the true goal of Nano isn't genius. It's to get a foundation done and built. Something that can be improved upon later. (There are some few souls who would argue with this, and manage to have good first drafts ready at the end of a Nano. They are the exception. And even with them, there is always much that must be changed afterwards.) The King of Swamp castle once said: "When I first came here, this was all swamp. Everyone said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built in all the same, just to show them. It sank into the swamp. So I built a second one. And that one sank into the swamp. So I built a third. That burned down, fell over, and then sank into the swamp. But the fourth one stayed up. And that’s what you’re going to get, Son, the strongest castle in all of England." Nano is about building the first castle, not the fourth. It will sink. But you've gotta get all them stones on the bottom to fill in the pit of despair so that your final, strong novel is a work of art that can be passed down through the ages. (Also, 10 e-cookies if you know the reference. And a scoop of ice cream.)

Not sure what your region is like, but I absolutely recommend trying to find a write-in or 30 near you that you can attend. Doing it by myself resulted in failure; it wasn't until I hit up the write-ins that I began winning. Also made some awesome friends that I spend time with throughout the year and not just during November (altho, I also have a few of those, too!)

I'm kaellok on the nano boards as well!

The insane are people, too, and can be capable of just as precise, methodical, approaches as anyone (or even more. ) one of the greatest mathematicians of our age was super crazy (John Nash, an incredible man with an incredible life.) Bleeder was at least as insane as Kelsier... and he was a psychopath. The appropriate response to someone forcing your actions is not to burn a city to the ground with the help of known super evil people, with little regard for who gets hurt along the way as long as you also take out your targets. There is a little justification for such action when the god is literally living among you, but much less when they are a mostly hands free insubstantial being. And remember that she allied with the Set. Any sympathy i might have otherwise had is strongly tempered by that fact alone.

I think you mean a missing p. Unless you're wanting to add a third r in there for some reason? o.o

I don't find what Harmony does at the end, to Bleeder, to be particularly bad. I have a cousin who has diagnosed borderline personality disorder, and if he stops taking his meds he'll be back in jail soon for trying/succeeding in hurting people. He's proven this multiple times. While on his meds, he's able to function within a civil society. He doesn't like the way the meds make him feel when he's on them. The rights of others to live trumps his right to to kill/maim/destroy/hurt other people just because he doesn't want to take his meds. And I don't feel bad at all for saying that. The end, there? That was Harmony force-feeding Bleeder her pills. It's not something to be happy about. Nor is it anything to be sad about. It just is. Now then, the thing that started it all? That's hinted (but not confirmed) to be forcing her to die so that Wax would go back to Elendel? That's where OP can make an argument--but it's just conjecture. We don't know what Harmony did to force Bleeder to take an action that she didn't want to (that I'm aware of.)

Unite, fellow Tineyes! Also, to OP, I *think* the word you were looking for on slide 4 is 'arithemetic'--unless you really did mean the band The Arithmatics. I couldn't tell by context from the answers which it was actually supposed to be. (Just took quiz again switching my answer based on what you meant, and still scored Tineye.)

Acorns Look Fearfully, Always Losing Flight Altitude SQUIRREL!