Thought

Being a heathen, I haven't finished the series yet, but I'll go with Mr. Monster. From now on, when I need to explain to someone what a "Man Vs. Self" plot is, I'll point to that book. EDIT: Having now finished the series, I stick with my earlier claim and say that Mr. Monster was my favorite. The moment I realized that Mr. Monster had taken over John is one that is just stuck in my memory. I can tell you where I was, what I was doing, etc, when I read that part. I didn't have a similar experience with I Don't Want to Kill You. It was still an amazing book, no doubts there.

Despite the series having so many books, despite it taking so many years, this last book still felt rushed. I loved it, no doubts there, but there were so many plots ending all at once that it didn't feel like there was time to end most of them properly. Given how many balls Jordan threw into the air, I'm not sure if was possible to have a book end it without making it feel rushed. That said, Sanderson was definitely the man to step in and keep those balls in the air, and end it all with a proper, gleeman flourish.

What are the costs associated with using magic? What are the limitations of the magic system itself? Why are there those limitations? Generally speaking, being able to do something is less interesting than being unable to do something. So, I'd like to know what barriers there are that magic users would have to work around, to make things interesting.

I have one word for you, just one word: radiation. Using magic gives the user ARS, while leaving the area "dirty," with all the implications there of. Of course, use too much, and you just die instantly instead, with the flesh essentially melted off your bones.

From Sazed's description, I had assumed that the well had only filled up twice. Once when Rashek took it, and then again when Vin did. Since Rashek found the lerasium, that seemed to indicate that Preservation put it there.

You're all Pulling me into this. When I see such good puns, I just feel Commanded to follow Suit. It's like my sense of humor is Heightening'ed. But, really, you're all Miles better than me at this. I'd Steel them from you, if I didn't fear the consequences. I'd imagine that Clubs would be involved, and that you'd make me see all sorts of Colors. Not that I get all the jokes, of course: some just slider right by me, and others I'm just re-pulser-ed by. ... okay, I think my interest in this had Wayned now. Good, thing, too: I've been laughing so hard that I'm out of Breath. EDIT: Oh, I suppose I should confess: Eye-spiked the punch.

Lerasium is highly limited, in comparison to Atium. The reason for this being that it is an enhancement metal: burn it, and it essentially binds to your sDNA, being thus with you forever, and your children, and your children's children's children. Atium, once burned, returns to the aether where it can condense again. However, the respective shards have some control over the production of their metals (not sure how Preservation forced Ruin to produce Atium), so the exact limits are a bit up to them, but given that the shards are themselves limited, definitely finite.

Unfortunately we don't have enough actual information to figure this out. The problem is, our hard numbers come from the RPG, but the RPG isn't reliable in this, so the best we can do is estimate. And if you want to estimate, why bother with math? If we use the RPG to determine the force of a push, we get 0.2235 newtons. That isn't enough to let coinshots bound through the air, as we know that they can. But if we assume that a coinshot can push with a force of 2g (or 19.6 newtons), then they should be shooting coins at a rate of 3920 meters per second squared (or 1752.4 miles per hour per second), which is far too fast for how it's described in the books themselves. The descriptions of duralumin can be taken two ways. One is that it it burns all the power that would have been released over time in an instant. So, with 2 minutes of reserve, a duralumin burn would increase power by a factor of 160. If a coinshot can produce 19.6 newtons, that translates into a force of 3136 newtons (or 320g's, enough to kill a person several times over). But if a coinshot can only produce 0.2235 newtons, then, duralumin gives 35.76 newtons. About 3.6 g's. That's too low for the duralumin pushes we see in the book. However, we could assume a factor of 10 for a duralumin burn. So, 19.6 newtons of force would be 196 newtons (20 g's) survivable, but damnation fast (so this might actually be accurate if we compare it to Vin's launch from Luthadel in WoA). However, the 0.2235 newtons described in the RPG still don't overcome gravity itself. So it is only if we assume what the force of a push is that we even get rational numbers. But, assuming the numbers aren't very scientific. That said, assuming that a coinshot can push with 2gs, and that duralumin burns reserves for a max benefit of a factor of 10, then he'll push with a force of 196 newtons. I suspect my math is wrong, but I am getting a total upwards distance traveled of around 1960 meters. Add to that the original 40 feet (13 meters), and we get 1973. More than a mile. EDIT: To note, clouds are around 2-6km above the ground. Assuming that Scadrial's ash layer is similar, that means that Vin might be able to push with around 3g's to get high enough to see clear sky, as she does in HoA.

About a month later than Mandamon, I finished, too. Clocks in at a total of 65k, which means that the last 10k took me about a month and a half to write. I blame the fact that the end is broken. However, I got "Hero With A Thousand Faces" for Christmas, been reading it, and have a good number of ideas as to why it's broken and how to fix it (basically, I had the penultimate conflict in place of the ultimate conflict, which was present in the first half of the book but not developed since I thought it wasn't an important conflict at all). I'm planning on writing up notes as to how, at this moment, I think the story can be fixed, then I'll set it aside for a month or so before starting on a triage-draft read through, followed by what will essentially be pre-alpha edits: at the very least, I'll be making the ending less painful to read, and fixing things I noted for myself as I wrote (such as "delete this scene" or "assume that this scene existed", etc). Hopefully, I'll be to an alpha stage by June. In the meantime, it is back to working on the project I had set aside for NaNoWriMo. I'd like to move on, but as NaNo taught me, I really need to work on the latter portion of books, and so this old project is right at the stage where I need to be practicing.

Aha! So, to my understanding (which isn't authoritative in the least: damnation it, Eric, I'm a historian, not a doctor!), ballistic trauma can be separated into cutting, crushing, stretching, and tearing aspects. Stretching damage, for example, is caused by the creation of the cavities as it pushes otherwise uncut tissue into an abnormal shape. Likewise, there's a lot of crushing damage that surrounds the wound. And so on.

My justification, at least, is that because the "cutting into" damage of a bullet isn't its only effect, and it is governed by different qualities of the thing being hit than the other damage. The ideal "bullet" will enter a person's body, go almost all the way through, but not leave the body. That maximizes all forms of damage to the individual. A bullet that does exit the body is wasting its energy, and is thus "unideal." A hard, high-velocity, somewhat-massive-but-not-nearly-as-massive bullet could cut all the way through a body, cause all the same cutting damage as a less-velocity-more-massive bullet that doesn't leave the body, but ultimately leave a person in better shape. While it's all related to kinetic energy eventually, the amount of that energy diverted strictly and solely to cutting is relatively minor and localized primarily to the cavity the bullet creates (if I understand it correctly, and I make no claim I do, the "cutting" creates a temporary cavity, while the rest of the effects is what creates a permanent cavity). That, of course, can still puncture veins, arteries, muscles, vital organs, etc. But all that cutting damage isn't effected that much by mass differences. The trauma to tissue surrounding the cavity is more related to mass, as is any breakage of bones (and thus damage to organs so protected). So, related, but different. Thus, Wax being able to be cut by bullets even when he's at a higher "weight" doesn't mean that "weight" must be affecting something other than mass, which is what I read your original comment to mean. As a side note, I like your idea about the gravity of "weight" possibly also influencing time dilation, though I can't say I fully understood your comments thus.

Interesting idea. Could also go with the calico effect, but, of course, that means that the character would have to be female (or male with two X chromosomes, which can have a lot of other effects), and that allomantic abilities are X-linked. The dealeo there is that since women have two X genes, but each cell only really needs one, roughly 50% of the father's X gene are inactivated, and roughly 50% of the mother's X gene are inactivated (if one or the other is defective, the body can also suppress that at a higher rate). So, such a calico-person could be 50% Tineye, 50% coinshot, but not a chimera. Probably wouldn't stand up to rigorous realmatics, but hey, it's a game. Well, the experiments failed in that they didn't create new constructs, but they might have been successful in creating a variety of specialty allomancers. Gives the vast number of hemalurgic binding points, it seems likely that you could transfer a power by placing the same spike in two different locations (although perhaps with different effects: I suspect that Zane's spike's position was responsible for some of his fine control over pushes). Really, the background would just need to be something like "Steve was the illegal son of a noble woman and a skaa. Take by the Steel Ministry, he was used in an experiment to create something cool, that failed, but Steve survived with an extra spike and associated power. Deemed useful, the Lord Ruler had him broken, indoctrinated, and put to work as an assassin for the glory of the empire."

That's not weird, that's a sniper. Seems like a valid profession to want to play. Also, to note, technically speaking, every misting can burn two metals. Namely, their normal metal (say, Tin) and Lerasium. But short of house rules (no reason you can't) or hemalurgy, there's no useful way to have a two-metal allomancer. The reason is basically that if you are kind of well connected to Preservation, you get one ability, but if you are a little closer than that, you get them all. Sort of like how email programs have "reply" and "reply all," or how modern English Language has a pronoun for one person or many persons, but not one for just two (Old English does have a dual pronoun, to note). The real reason is that it worked better for the story that way. Originally, I believe, Sanderson was going to only have mistborn, but that made them seem too common, so he went with something lesser, and still wanted to have specialties, as a holdover from when the first book was a heist novel.

Sounds like it. As for why mass, not “weight,” has to be stored for flying to work, the reason is simple: “weight” isn’t a thing itself but the interaction of two other things (mass and gravity, or W=mg). If W decreases when an iron ferring stores, but m remains constant, then we know that g is what must be decreasing. So, if an iron ferring isn’t storing mass, they must be storing gravity’s influence on him or herself. The problem is, in order to fly, an iron twinborn would have to not only compensate for gravity, they’d have to overcome it. How is upward acceleration obtained? Well, by pulling on the counterweight. But, because for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, by pulling himself up, he also pulls the counterweight down. Well, he pulls is back up, then. Except that the forces this time will be the exact same as the forces from the other pull. The counterweight accelerates the twinborn downwards just as much as it had accelerated him upwards. And, throughout that all, gravity is still effecting the counterweight at the very least. Thus, sustained flight is impossible. In contrast, by changing mass, a twinborn can change every interaction of forces (F=ma), resulting in a net acceleration of “up.” A twinborn increases mass, pulls on a counterweight, and it goes shooting up while he is pulled downward by the same force. Because m is different between the two objects, even though the force is the same, the acceleration will be different as well. So, with a lot of mass, the twinborn accelerates downward just a little, while the counterweight accelerates upward a lot. Twinborn stores his mass instead and pulls again. This time the reverse: the force remains the same, but the counterweight is pulled downward with less acceleration than the previous interaction, and the twinborn upwards with more. Thus, he flies! Of course, storing “weight” might actually store both mass and gravity. The point is just that storing weight has to store mass, not that it can’t store gravity as well. Perhaps we’re still talking across one another? Wax says that bullets still cut him, even when he taps his metalmind. You said that the quote proves “weight” doesn’t protect him from impacts. Yet, my point was that bullets cause damage in two ways, one by cutting into the person, and the other by transferring kinetic energy through impact. Even if tapping weight helps him resist kinetic energy, it wouldn’t help him with the piercing damage. Thus, Wax’s statement remains true regardless of if he taps mass or not.

If that's the case, then I agree with you. I thought that the farmboy/chosen one was the viewpoint. Thus, him being the chosen one would have been more central, and the work on the farm probably being more of an amusing aside (a chosen hero riding between the People's Palace and his little plot of land to weed is a fun bit of color, but still only color). However, if he isn't the viewpoint, then you are quite right. I'd still have a problem with it not being clear, but I definitely like it far more looking at it your way. Works well enough. Doesn't, you know, reach out and abduct me, but I like the movement of it. Too passive for me. I'm assuming that "he" is the main character, but from the very first line we have him being nothing but an inanimate object. Perhaps make it clear that he is watching, that he can't physically do anything, but have his mind, his outrage, be very active instead. I like the underlying gist of it, though not the exact implementation. I think "he'd been reading" could be assumed. The rubbing his eyes is a little too... mundane. Anyone, not just scholars, might do that after they've been reading for a while. Maybe instead he's been taking notes, so he rubs the sour muscles in his hand, or wipes off the ink that's darkened them, etc. Something a little more unique, I guess. But again, I like the basics of what's going on.

@Eric, good point about a diamond's brittleness. I had forgotten to take that into account. However, even though you mentioned the key concepts, you totally missed them. What stops a bullet is hardness and elasticity, primarily. What saves a person in a car crash is mass. That is why you were wrong. Hardness and other factors are important in a car crash, but the major damage comes from a massive object transferring its kinetic energy to a less massive one. Because of the mass differences, the energy produces more damage. Equalize the masses, and the two objects will fair similarly. Increase the mass on the lesser object significantly, and the damage to it is reduced. Indeed, increase it enough and the damage from this transfer of energy can be largely negated. All the other damage still remains, of course. Bullets function along the same way. They cause damage by transferring kinetic energy from a more massive object (a lead alloy bullet) to a less massive bit of flesh. But wax can increase his mass, so he can negate that damage to a decent extent. However, bullets cut into the skin, and cutting, though it involves mass, has more to do with hardness, elasticity, etc, which tapping "weight" doesn't influence. Thus, while Wax should be able to survive the punch of a bullet better, they are still going to cut him, they'll still cause him to bleed, etc. And since we know that storing weight actually stores mass (as flying, which Sanderson confirmed, wouldn't work with weight but does with mass), it makes perfect sense that Wax could survive the impact of a car but still get cut by bullets. Or, to put is another way, mass should help him endure crushing wounds, but not piercing ones. Actually, tapping mass should make the bullet a little worse, in that it will definitely transfer all its energy to his body (more massive cells should drag on the bullet more, causing it to slow more, and reduce the chance of it exiting). It might be that storing "weight" would actually help survive bullet wounds, because the bullet it more likely to pass through the body easily, and thereby not fully transfer its energy. As for cotton candy, interesting idea. I am not entirely sure, though, as you'd have to line up so much cotton candy to create enough drag that I might expect gravity to finish the bullet off first. @Dyring, you're right. I was almost positive it was several stories, and that he didn't have time to push off anything, but there it is, in the book, otherwise. Though still, we know that Wax changes his mass, so he should still be better at surviving high levels of kinetic energy transfer. EDIT: Essentially ninja'ed by Satsuoni... by over an hour. I should write faster. At this point, I am fairly certain that storing/tapping "weight" really affects an individual's relation to higgs-boson particles.

Yes, and we have the word of Sanderson on this: His concern was getting hit with the counterweight, not the physics of it, and that was just with an Iron Twinborn. With a full twinawesome, it makes perfect sense that we could combine Vin's trick with a proper counterweight (or counterweights) and obtain flight. The most efficient way would probably be for two twinawesome to work in tandem and serve as eachother's counterweight Actually, no, it doesn't prove that. Wax said that bullets can still cut him. Cutting and impacting are different things. A diamond is dense, but not necessarily heavy, and a bullet will probably be stopped by it, leaving barely a scratch. In contrast, a ton of cotton candy would be heavy, but not dense. A bullet should go right through it without a problem. We know that Wax was able to survive a drop of several stories, through floors, by increasing his "weight." Falling even two should have been enough to seriously injure him. The implication here is that his mass would indeed help him survive a car crash. The oddity comes in that storing "weight" actually stores mass. By increasing his mass, Wax should also be increasing his density (as density a product of mass over volume, and we know his volume doesn't change along with his mass). Yet we know, from comments like the original quote, that he isn't changing his density. Clearly, iron ferrings can control higgs-boson particles in a novel way.

I quite like the second sentence, it's quiet evocative, and I love the idea of trust being related to the sun's position. However, I am not sure the first sentence is needed. I think you are conveying that someone is traveling, thus the following line of description, but as it is actually formulated, it seems abstract. If even family can't be trusted, then not only is it a terrible time to be traveling, it is also a terrible time to go on a date, do your taxes, play a round of golf, etc. I just don't think that first sentence is pulling its weight, and suspect everything that follows the second sentence will make it redundant. I like it, but it feels familiar. Not that I've read it before, mind you, just... familiar. Sorry, not really sure how to put it. It reminds me of the opening line from A Christmas Carol ("Marley was dead: to begin with"), so, yeah. I have a feeling there is more going on here than meets the eye (sort of like Howard Taylor's Sci-Fi story opening in which the main character is feeling wind against his skin, and we only later find out that his "skin" is really a ship). Not bad, probably enough to get me to read more.

Actually, I found your comments quite useful! Thank you very much. I do want the random feeling to be undermined (personally, I dislike opening lines that feel random, even if they are actually random). Indeed, most of the rest of the paragraph works to try to undermine the randomness and oddity of that line. So, I can take away from your comments that I was at least partially successful in that goal. The fact that you're not sure if you like the sentence itself is also useful. I have a tendency to write in a very byzantine style (as evident by my use of words like "byzantine"). I can take away from this, then, that the sentence needs some tinkering to untwist its crooked paths, as it were. Anywho, thanks again.

I'm with Observer on this. I think if you just took out "and became the chosen one," it would work far better. Whatever it means to be the chosen one, it feels like that is something that needs to be set up before being introduced. As for one of my own, here's the first line from my NaNoWriMo project:

Congratulations! That's awesome (and 70k in a month and a half, with no planning [if I am recalling correctly], is rather impressive).

The thread is feeling a little light and fluffy (particularly since Chaos followed up that Sabaton/Demons&Wizards duo with Girls Generation). I think we might need some more allomantically active music of great weight, for balance. First, if you want to listen to songs about Bilbo Baggins from someone OTHER than Leonard Nimoy: And second, for the last two months, my playlist has consisted largely of Van Canto, an A Capella heavy metal group:

Unless the metalmind is full of investiture, perhaps.

Allow me to be crazy for a moment: Perhaps halfshard is alive but lacks a soul? We know that shardblade does not cut the physical form of a living thing. We also know that shardblade does cut inanimate objects (with the exception of other shardblades and shardplate). However, we do know that halfshard is different than shardblades and shardplate (for one, when its destroyed, its destroyed). Thus we can eliminate those options. Since a shardblade doesn't cut halfshard, it would then seem to indicate that shardplate is alive. This, of course, begs the question of why doesn't a shardblade cut a halfshard's soul. The solution there being that it lacks one. Halfshard may thus be like commandless Nightbloods.

My main goal in NaNoWriMo was to try new things. Like, a lot. I never wrote a YA book before, I never wrote an Urban Fantasy before, I never wrote 1st person before, I never wrote a female primary protagonist before, I never outlined so early before, I never tried scene-sequel format before, I never tried any coherent overarching structure (such as 3-act) before, I never wrote so much so quickly before, I never had others holding me accountable before, I never had the specific support of my family for writing on weekends (and Holidays!) before, etc. My first reaction is an immense sense of satisfaction. Not so much because I succeeded, but because it wasn't nearly as hard as I had previously thought. I've known about NaNoWriMo for years, but had always been too afraid to try because that seemed like setting myself up for failure. I'd have a totally different feeling if I had succeeded in finishing everything, but with it being a slog all the way. I attribute a lot of this to the fact that I outlined and had structure. I think I've mentioned before that I used to think that I was a discovery writer. I started reading Sanderson's blog, then listening to Writing Excuses, and found his and Dan Wells' stories to be quite inspiring, so I started experimenting. As such, I outlined a little (very little) for a project I started back in March or February. That helped immensely. I did a better outline for a few chapters, in July, and that helped even more. So, for NaNo, I wanted to outline intensely. I was... somewhat successful. I got a good, in-depth outline for about 1/3rd of the book, with only a very skeletal frame for the rest. Still, I knew where acts ended, and where everything was headed. The first third of the book was an immense joy. It felt like reading a thriller, sometimes, as I wrote! Totally new experience (I love writing, but hadn't gotten an adrenaline rush from doing so before). Writing the rest of the book was helped by my skeletal outline, but it was rougher going, didn't have quite the same feeling, and I think those sections will need the heaviest revision. Lesson for next time: get the outline done to the level I want before starting (which is hard, because making the outline makes me really eager to start writing). I want to find out how much outlining is right for me, but I know it is more outlining than I've done. First Person's been quite interesting. It is definitely easier to maintain a quick pace, though I've had a lot of trouble with tense consistency (supposed to be past, slip into present during tense moments, when I'm eager to write the next page). Also, I think I might be a little... too close. The character is reporting too much, I think, rather than simple describing ("I heard water dripping..." v "water dripped..."). It's been fun, as I can put in more humour, though I am not really sure if the character has her own voice. Urban Fantasy is a challenge in that I don't feel like I've properly conveyed the otherness of the other world, yet the real world influence is also sort of vague. Something to clean up in revision, hopefully. YA.... well, to be fair, I largely just view it as a normal book with a young protagonist. Oddly enough, I know that it is quite unmarketable. It's about history, has a female protagonist, lacks a mystery and romance, etc. But it's been an idea demanding to get out for quite some time, so... The speed of writing is most encouraging. Before this, I thought that 500 words an hour was good, and 1000k a day acceptable. Now both of those seem like really tiny goals. I've been writing slowly this last week, because I am rather exhausted, but hope to average 1.5 to 2k here on out. Basically, NaNoWriMo taught me that, you know, maybe I can do this writing thing. Of course, if the book is horrible, I might feel differently, but I won’t know until later.