Pagerunner

I don't think this is actually Sanderson-influenced. Threnody is a real word; Brandon didn't make it up. https://www.dictionary.com/browse/threnody?s=t It's a little amusing - "Threnody" and "singers" are both things in the cosmere. But it's gotta be coincidental.

I found out about it when the audio was uploaded, unfortunately.

I was not at the signing; there is a Q&A session that I believe was before the event. Its audio is up, as well.

I would be wary of selling Isaac short. He does get access to info we don't have to be able to create these things. I recall, at JordanCon a few years back, Isaac was speaking about glyphs, and he mentioned a connection between Alethi glyph components and Dawnchant. Several people who were in the room "corrected" Isaac, informing him that Dawnchant was the singer language, not the human language. But, in the intervening years, we've learned that Alethi glyphs do ultimately derive from Dawnchant. I think this may be something similar, where Isaac's terminology differs from our own because he has more information, not because we (the fans) do.

Signing line audio is up for transcription. A little bit more will be on the way. https://wob.coppermind.net/events/398-prague-signing/

Isaac made a passing comment about the "Voidbinding" chart in his recent AMA. He refers to it as a Surgebinding chart. (If the chart in the back of WoK isn't a Surgebinding chart, then Isaac has only created one. Since there are plural "charts," the one in the back must also be a form of Surgebinding.) Which makes sense. The glyphs are all the same, just presented differently; the only substantial differences between the charts are some of the interconnecting lines. And it fits with how Renarin has a "corrupted" form of Illumination instead of the typical Surge. But it raises questions of relationships to Shards. Which Shard is Surgebinding "of"? Is Voidbinding a separate magic system entirely, or an expansion of Surgebinding? Is there a true Odious magic system floating around out there (the infamous "ten levels") which we have yet to see in detail?

Buckle up. It's graph time. Brandon made a comment recently at a convention that his writing career is now almost as long as Robert Jordan's was while he was writing the Wheel of Time. The first Wheel of Time book was published in 1990, and the last one before Jordan's death was in 2005. Brandon's first book was in 2005; by 2020, he'll eclipse Jordan's tenure. So, I decided to crunch some numbers and compare them. (I'm including projections for Skyward 2, assuming it's the same wordcount as the first book, and Stormlight 4 at 400,000 words for a November 2020 release.) Brandon has essentially had three writing careers in this time: 1) the Cosmere, 2) his non-Cosmere stuff, and 3) writing the final Wheel of Time Trilogy. Here's a comparison of Robert Jordan's writing speed to each of Brandon's careers, and Brandon's total speed. Notice that each line has a dashed average. This represents the average writing speed for that career. A couple things I found interesting: Robert Jordan had a significant drop off. You can see that sharp angle about five years in, between WoT books 6 and 7. He maintained that later speed fairly well, up til the end. I suspect you'll see that with many other successful authors, for reasons creative or personal, but... Brandon's total writing speed has remain essentially unchanged. He has matched Jordan's initial pace fairly well, and his total wordcount (solid line) stays pretty true to the average (dashed line). There's some funky stuff going on around WoT, where Brandon was working harder than usual, but that was making up for a bit of a slower start. (More on that later.) After WoT, his total writing speed and each of his career writing speeds have tracked their average very closely. Brandon's Cosmere career has remained remarkably consistent. Even though there was that huge slowdown with Cosmere books during WoT, the initial post-Mistborn push, with Warbreaker and Way of Kings releasing, was enough to keep things averaged out until Brandon could finish up WoT and write Words of Radiance. (The solid blue line gets well above the average at the 5-year mark, but stays pretty flat until the WoR release.) As he's settled in to his groove after WoT, it gets a little choppier, but that's an effect of writing bigger books. He's still writing the same amount of words. Brandon's non-Cosmere career has.... remained remarkably consistent. This career actually has two regimes, which is why I included multiple averages. The uppermost red dashed line is the total non-Cosmere average, and it rides well above the solid red line. This indicates that the trend is concave up; Brandon is writing more and more non-Cosmere than he used to. But it's not a gradual process; after WoT, he started working on stuff like Reckoners and Skyward. So I gave non-Cosmere another average trendline with two segments; you'll see the inflection point right around 3000 days, with the release of Rithmatist. Since then, he's been pretty consistent in the amount of non-Cosmere he wrote. Brandon's Wheel of Time career is pretty obscene. The green dashed line is essentially the same slope as the blue dashed line. Brandon wrote twice as hard as he used to when he started working on Wheel of Time. My man. I crunched the numbers. I can't deny them. Brandon's pumping out Cosmere books just as fast as he used to. But 2019 is the second year ever we have had no Cosmere stories published. (Not counting White Sand, since Brandon didn't write anything for those.) The first time it happened... 2018. It feels like we haven't been getting as much Cosmere, and so many stories have been waiting years for their resolutions. (The gap between Bands of Mourning and Lost Metal will be larger than between Alloy of Law and Shadows of Self. Rithmatist and Alcatraz have been hanging out forever, with the end always just around the corner. Even Legion, a novella trilogy, took seven years to complete.) I think the answer to this is scope creep. Brandon's not writing any slower, but his plans are getting bigger and bigger. Each Stormlight book is larger than the last. Plans are changing - Skyward was a secret project, followed up by Children of the Nameless as another Secret Project. We'll still get as many words; but waiting a long time for 1 Stormlight book book feels more painful than 3 Mistborn books totaling the a similar amount of words. Same thing for the non-Cosmere projects waiting for their finales; it's not that Brandon doesn't have time, it's that he devotes his time to a different project, instead. If we take Brandon's average writing rates (Cosmere: 191K words/year; non-Cosmere: 134K words/year), and we assume he's gonna be writing Stormlight (400K ea), Mistborn/Elantris (250K ea), and W&W/YA (120K ea), that gets us projected release dates of: This is all assuming he sticks to the average. Which, so far, has been a good long-term bet, but not a good short-term bet. So I'd expect these releases to be more clumped together, as he'll alternate what's getting focused time. My final projected Cosmere completion date is 2055. A nice, round 50 years. (My last estimate I put together, back when Brandon was working on Oathbringer, was in 2052. Over three years, the projection has moved back three years. Uh oh... let's not focus too much on that. I was much less rigorous in my analysis.) What we've seen from the Wheel of Time excursion, though, is that Brandon is not writing at his maximum capacity. About one-third of his WoT writing speed was transferred over to his current non-Cosmere work. (I'd guess the remaining two-thirds turned into family time, since he started having kids right around then. [Well, his wife started having kids. You know what I mean.]) If push comes to shove and Brandon decides to make a focused effort to knock out more Cosmere books, his pace can increase considerably, even without cutting back on his non-Cosmere writing hours. If he were to go full-speed ahead, nothing but Cosmere, I'd project a 2037 completion date; 32 years from start to finish. Obviously, it won't be that. (At the very least, he'd have to fit Rithmatist 2 in there, which would push the whole thing to 2039, somehow.) But based on Brandon's 15-year career so far, it looks like the Cosmere will last between 32 and 50 years. Which doesn't seem terribly unreasonable. In conclusion, please don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to say anything about what Brandon should or shouldn't be writing. I just like the data, and I think we can learn a lot based on what Brandon has accomplished so far. He prides himself on his consistency. (That's his canned answer about how he writes so much; he's not fast, he's just consistent.) And that's exactly what the data shows.

Crafty's doing a little bit of reminder promotion about the custom card creator, and they tweeted out one of my cards! (It's actually Aether of Night content, so it's not technically legal for this forum, but it's not any real spoilers or anything. I took care to avoid any of the book's twists.) It reminded me that I never actually finished the development for the mini-expansion I was working on; I posted some in-depth thoughts over on Crafty's forum, if anybody wants to join me over there. http://www.crafty-games.com/forum/index.php?topic=8753.msg175913#msg175913

Lightspren are not white; they are bronze.

I think that's also too specific, and that Division in application is too inconsistent to be tied down to a fundamental principle like that. The rocks burning is a particularly bad example, since there is no natural phenomenon that will make a rock burn. (Okay, sure, you could have a vein of pure magnesium or some nonsense like that, but normal old rocks aren't going to react with oxygen.)

Details are up on the website. Utopiales: Paris, at 7:00 PM on Nov 5th:

There was an interesting new quote from a convention this past week that illuminates the "Radiance" aspect of my table in particular: This is exactly what I think is happening in Thaylen Field when Dalinar starts counting off his Radiants, sees Taln and Ash off in a corner, and then thinks there's one missing (a.k.a. Venli). That's a manifestation of him pulling the Spiritual Realm closer, he's seeing that the ten main characters that will, in some form or fashion, be important as 'representative members' of their Radiant Orders.

Audio is out for transcription for this event, as well.

This is the theory you're thinking of. Not a WoB.

Audio's starting to come out on Arcanum, for anyone interested in transcribing. There's some fun stuff in there. (Link for anyone who is too lazy to scroll up in the thread, but not too lazy to help transcribe: https://wob.coppermind.net/events/395-icon-2019/)

In this case, you'll want to type "allomancy+hemalurgy" in the search bar. I think that will give you what you want. https://wob.coppermind.net/adv_search/?query=allomancy%2Bhemalurgy The "+" will exclude any results that don't include both words. When you sort "by accuracy," anything that includes both of those words as tags will be ranked higher than other search results.

Added the latest reading to the list. No transcription yet, just the audio; I'll update the link once it gets transcribed.

TWG 100%: Brandon 100% (116/116), Peter 100% (116/116), Isaac 100% (75/75), Ben 100% (38/38) 17S 100%: Brandon 100% (104/104), Peter 100% (110/110), Isaac 100% (110/110), Ben 100% (99/99) Reddit 91%: Brandon 100% (133/133), Peter 100% (106/106), Isaac 100% (24/24), Ben 62% (54/87), Adam 100% (15/15), Store 100% (5/5) Twitter 43%: Brandon 100% (126/126), Peter 17% (21/126), Isaac 16% (21/133), Adam 37% (21/57) Blog 100%: Brandon 100% (213/213) Social Media Total: 84% (1502/1788) Theoryland Review: 10% (121/1183) Events and Signings Review: 0% (0/397) Cranking along on Ben's Reddit account. Also, I know I say that Isaac's at 100%, but that's because he was considerate enough to start his recent AMA on October 1st, leaving my metrics unaffected. But he did add well over a hundred new Reddit comments, most of which haven't been put into Arcanum yet. So if any of you reading this are looking for some work, you can go track that down. Here's probably the most interesting thing of Ben's that I've added recently: A good chunk of what I'm adding from Ben is stuff that would go along with a companion book; all kinds of ecological details that inform the artists. There's definitely enough information generated to fill such a book. Hmm. I wonder whatever happened to the art book that was supposed to accompany the Kaladin music album. There was a "Part 1" update back in June, saying that update Part 2 was coming the next week.

There was a post on Reddit that gathered quite a few sources for potential future stories. It was from almost a year back, and it includes everything (Cosmere and non-Cosmere), but you'd probably find it interesting. It has quite a few esoteric references. https//www.reddit.com/r/brandonsanderson/comments/9z18ko/chart_of_all_published_and_potential_brandon/ Here's the source for Elantris as a "Core Story." https://wob.coppermind.net/events/131/#e3986 Here's something recent, where Brandon's assistant Peter said Dragonsteel is likely at 3 books. (Though, of course, that will be subject to change until it's actually written. https://wob.coppermind.net/events/379/#e12955 I don't see you mention the Sixth of the Dusk sequel. Brandon did some work on it this year, so it may actually be the next Cosmere story we see. https://wob.coppermind.net/adv_search/?query=&date_from=2003-12-05&date_to=2019-10-06&speaker=&tags=sixth+of+the+dusk+sequel&ordering=-date

I've collected all the WoBs on Tension in another thread: Since it's the one we have the least information on, there isn't too much to prove or disprove any proposed mechanism. A common theme for all the Surges is that they are more complex than a simple physical principle. Gravitation can affect a single gravitational relationship between two objects (person and planet) or all gravitational relationships of a single object (pulling all the arrows to impact a shield). Division can be unnaturally exothermic (making stone burn) or endothermic (making wood turn straight to ash). Cohesion, as I demonstrate in my thread, is especially bad, requiring several 'secondary powers' to function as we see it on-screen. So, we'll need to see exactly how Tension plays out once it it makes it to the books, and how many different mechanisms it would require for all its effects. It's certainly possible that sometimes, it would behave like modifying the stress/strain curve. But I don't think that would necessarily disqualify Tension from working on a liquid; the Surge would just operate on an entirely different under those situations.

I have not seen any definitive statement that it has been retconned out. It was a possibility Brandon discussed, but like you said, there's nothing in the third graphic novel to address it. The WoB you link and one other one seem to indicate that it still is a thing in the cosmere, just that it functions differently: Since there is explicitly a "fix" in White Sand 3, it's worth asking what specific deviations there are in this volume from the original novel. The battle with Drile has a new lines, Kenton's thoughts about feeling the sand on a deeper level than ever before (four pages before the end of Part 5). It's not present in the original draft (pages 1006 through 1007), so it makes me think that Kenton was just about to figure out how to slatrify. On the other hand, the original draft did have a portion (page 1014) where Drile attempted to slatrify, which has been removed. All in all, I don't see anything definitive either way. I suspect, now that it's out, someone will ask Brandon about it later this year, either on the fall tour to Europe/Israel or at the Starsight release party.

I wouldn't be surprised if they're restocked concurrent with the Warbreaker leatherbound release at the end of this year - IIRC, the Mistborn 1 leatherbounds got a new print run concurrent with the Mistborn 2 leatherbound release. But the Sanderson Store has a Reddit account; they'll have the actual information. https://www.reddit.com/user/sandersonstore/

I can't believe I somehow missed this. I had just sat down to attempt to decipher this, and someone pointed me over here. At JordanCon, about a year and a half back, Isaac ran out of time to talk to me about glyphs, so he let me email him a few questions. One was about the Alethi calligraphic phonemes. I had guesses at four of them, from cross-referencing various glyphs. G, E, I, and N, respectively. And then, during Isaac's panel, I thought I caught him drawing a calligraphic "R." Watch the section from 19:40 - 20:00 in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03Om1jQ46kQ&t=1194s . It reminded me of a phoneme I had been seen come up in several glyphs: I asked him about those five, and he said I had four of them correct. Since what I thought was the "R" looks exactly like the Dawnchant "M," I'm thinking that's the one I've got mistaken. Having the advantage of the video now, I think I'm able to see the difference, although with the amount of distortions typical for glyphs, it's still entirely possible it's an M. He didn't explicitly say it was the alternate R, just that it was a symbol in the alternate alphabet. I'm pretty rusty at glyphs right now; I'll need to sit down and brush up on where I got my original four guesses. Don't know when I'll have time for that, though. I'd like to take the other Dawnchant symbols that don't match the standard set and see if they appear in any other glyphs; I don't think anyone's done that yet, have they?

Aww I thought you made a physical globe. Misleading title. Disappointed.

All audio has received at least a first pass at transcription. Feel free to go claim questions (for those who were at the event) or help touch up transcriptions (for those of you who were not.) Or just to catch up on what we learned. https://wob.coppermind.net/events/394-dragoncon-2019/