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Twig is still ongoing, right? I was thinking I'd read Pact, just because it's finished. I'm not yet invested in Wildbow to the extent that I want to torture myself by getting into a serial where I have to wait for installments to come out.

It does. I really like that series a lot. I'm anxiously awaiting the last volume, while simultaneously fearing that it might end up like Night Angel, with at least two extra volumes' worth of material jammed in to the last book to wrap things up.

Just finished. That was really good, I must say.

It looks like it's going to be really good. Unfortunately, I got sidetracked by Worm because I forgot the book at home one day (I have downtime at work when I can read), so I turned to something I can read online. I have to say, I am really liking Worm a lot.

I had never heard of the story before setting this thread. Checked it out on a whim, and now I'm on Arc 12. It's a LOT like Wild Cards. I wouldn't say it's a ripoff (though I think since people probably would), but it is incredibly similar, both superficially and thematically. I was going to say it's like a YA Wild Cards, but with the intensely disturbing Slaughterhouse Nine stuff happening, I don't think the "YA" applies anymore. Wild Cards is still generally way more messed up, but this is still quite the dark story.

The Long Price Quartet has an interesting magic system. Is it "worthy of Brandon"? That's not really an easy question to answer because it's so different. I think it fits because you really begin to believe that this magic system should work. The magic is all done by beings called Andat, who are abstract concepts made flesh by poet-sorcerers. The poet-sorcerers have to create a lengthy spell, of sorts, that perfectly expresses the concept entire (in a special magical language, if I recall correctly), then recite that perfectly. If successful, the Andat will manifest as something that looks human and will be bonded to the poet-sorcerer who summoned it. The Andat themselves hate being physical and want to go back to being ideas, but they're stuck until the poet-sorcerer dies without passing his bond to another. They are used according to to their abilities by the societies they're in. For example, there is an Andat named Seedless who is mostly used to get seeds out of cotton, but he is also a military deterrent because if anyone attacks them, he can make everyone and everything in their country sterile (his real name means "removing the part which continues").

EDIT: I should read before I respond.

I agree, which is why it drives me crazy that I can't get any traction with my magical AI theory. I really think it's the most interesting way for it to work.

Do you have a Twitter account? If you just tweet the picture to him and Peter Ahlstrom, one of them will see it and probably re-tweet. I've gotten responses from tweets to both of them, and I didn't even have any sweet art to share.

Yeah, I've considered picking it up recently. When I had just finished the first trilogy, I was turned off by it.

I'm pretty sure that the Returned are probably the closest comparison. It seems to me that Elantrians are more like other magic users than they they are like Heralds or Returned. The thing about the Returned is that they are Splinters, in a sense, but they don't work like seons, skaze, or spren. They're more like Splinterholders, as the sapience remains in the human, and the Splinter itself doesn't become a sapient magic being. Now, the honorblades must certainly be Splinters, and the Heralds' abilities must be somehow linked. Naturally, having a sword isn't the same as a Divine Breath being part of your being, but I still think that that's the closest comparison.

I must say, I am feeling quite smug about apparently being right about storing all of your Identity away making you able to use any metalmind. This smugness is tempered quite a bit by the fact that I figured that out pretty easily, but never once did it occur to me that one could store other attributes while in an Indentity-less state to create universal metalminds.

I only read the first Recluce book and don't really remember how the magic works, but I remember that the magic in Imager is fairly well described. I liked the first three books, but when I found out that the next volume jumps back in time several hundred years, I decided not to bother (this is the same reason I lost interest in Recluce, where the first book is basically the last, chronologically). The magic system isn't as intricately detailed as in a Sanderson book, but it does have consistent rules and limitations. I'm sure it's not news to many of you here that Brian McClellan has some very Sanderson-esque magic in his Powder Mage trilogy, which he certainly must have learned under Brandon's tutelage in his writing classes. It's a fairly entertaining series, but it really isn't as good as anything in the Cosmere. I echo a number of suggestions, above, that the magic in Lightbringer is the closest you'll find to one of Sanderson's magic systems. I know that most of Brent Weeks' fans are all about Night Angel, but I didn't like that trilogy nearly as much as Lightbringer (which I will hopefully continue to like when the the last book comes out).

You need "Last Flowers" in there too!

I remember reading a lot of positive stuff about that when it first came out, and I read it shortly thereafter. It was pretty good, as I recall, but I don't think I liked it quite as much as the reviews said I should. I'll probably still read the sequel. I just finished reading Mythwalker (well, as much of it as exists), and it was interesting to see the roots of various books contained therein. It's referred to as Warbreaker Prime, but there is a lot that made it into Mistborn and Stormlight in there, too. Now, I'm on to The Lies of Locke Lamora, which I have been intending to read for a while. I'm only a few pages in, so I don't know how I like it yet.

Maybe not as awesome as one might think. Nightblood is so powerful because of the Investiture within him. It might be difficult to burn the metal in a way that accessed that Investiture. Things get complicated there because it's probably somewhat like Compounding. The question is whether you'd face the barrier of the Investiture being keyed to an individual, as when one burns a metalmind. Of course, Breaths don't work like Feruchemy. Anyone can use a Breath; Identity isn't really an issue. But if you tried to hack the magic system and use it in a distinctly Scadrian way, maybe Identity would become a factor. And then Nightblood's metal would basically be useless allomantically because of the thousands of Identities connected to the Investiture within. Anyway, I'm pretty sure that this speculating belongs in the Cosmere Theories board, but I'm confident that nothing that I've said counts as a spoiler, since it's probably totally incomprehensible.

I didn't think that the characters were necessarily not interesting. I just really didn't like them. I think that was the major problem, for me. No matter who the chapter focused on, I just didn't care to hear anything about what that piece of @#$% was doing. Maybe that's just about the same as them not being interesting, but it seemed like there was interesting stuff about them. I just hated them too much to want to find any of it out.

The competition thing seems very likely, but it must be specific in some way. He got spooked and ran away when Firefight challenged him, which seems to point to his weakness. However, he fought Steelheart for a long time in the first book and never ran or fell victim to his weakness. I do have an idea. So, Prof should have been able to beat Firefight eventually, even if she was really powerful right after her resurrection. I'm not 100% certain, but I think that he was aware that he was more powerful than her. I also think that he was probably better qualified than his colleagues (at least in his mind) to win that NASA trip. He has an aversion to contests in which his opponent has a chance to beat him, even though he outclasses them. His weakness is based on his fear of being humiliated by losing to someone he should be able to beat. Maybe.

Alas, I don't have one right now and am at work and unable to spend time thinking one up. I was just excited that I knew the answer, so... I yield my turn to whoever has been saving up a good one.

I keep telling you, man. You gotta read Mistborn. This is not much of a spoiler, but just in case you don't want to know anything before reading, So that's why one might wonder what burning Shardplate would do.

Hoid

It's hard to say, since we haven't seen a whole lot of either planet, but I think Threnody is the more likely of the two. It's more a gut feeling than anything, based on the little snippet of Yolish life we see in The Liar of Partinel sample chapters (which, sure, aren't canon, but I'd be surprised if every single thing about them got scrapped). Then again, I think it is most likely that we haven't seen Yolen at all yet. My thinking is that the 17th Shard probably has some kind of home base, and their leader is a freaking dragon. We haven't seen anything resembling that on any of the other Shardworlds. Even the ones that do have crazy non-human creatures don't have anything like intelligent dragons. It seems most reasonable to me that they're still hanging out on Yolen, and we would know if we had seen it. Now, I am well aware that there are a whole bunch of reasons that my idea could be wrong. Maybe Yolen is First of the Sun or Threnody, and Frost is hiding out somewhere. Heck, maybe he can shapeshift into a human--I don't know how Cosmere dragons work. Maybe the Shard doesn't have any kind of base, and they just communicate by sending letters back and forth through their network of worldhopping agents. Who knows? Looks like we'll find out in 15 or 20 years.

The emphasis is supposed to be more subtle than with italics. In some cases, it's less about the way it should sound and more about isolating words to emphasize the concept or what have you. It makes sense: a common complaint with fantasy is that there are all of these unfamiliar words, making it hard to follow the story. So if you do something like put "Kerztian" in bold, it sort of separates it from the rest of the sentence. People who have trouble dealing with unfamiliar words then realize that they do actually understand the sentence. It's a pretty neat trick to make your work more approachable for the uninitiated.

Keep in mind, that's only 7 years away. Dates these days just sound like they're straight outta sci-fi.

I might just do that. I'm gonna still give Gardens another chance, though. I just finished The Traitor Baru Cormorant. Geez. It was a good book, but... I don't know. It's like 1984 in a magic-less high fantasy setting. I honestly don't know whether to recommend it or not.