Nitpicking

Finished. Having just a few days ago watched the Shardcast on Sanderson Avalanches, we see their distant ancestor here. It has all the hallmarks they mentioned: Rapidly-switched points of view Learning new things about the magic Character secrets revealed Characters leveling up their magic (e. g. Ryalla's laserblast power, Topaz's creation power letting him drive a god away) This has more falling action than most of Brandon's stuff. I like the very last scene, with Topaz having survived decapitation, thus making Ryalla's thinking he could survive anything literally true. What's up with Topaz's ring? It clearly isn't what gives him the healing power, he returns from death after it's stolen! What will it do for our favorite new king? if anything. I mean, we're unlikely to ever find out what Brandon had in mind originally, but I'm curious. The revelation that Jerick microkinetically cut his dad in half left me smiling, not tearful. It's so silly, and Jerick is damned whiny. If he hadn't done something, the armed assassin would probably still have killed his father, after all. I also like Torell's redemption arc starting at the end of this book. If the sequel had been written, I can see him losing even more of his irritating qualities, teaching the prince, etc. He's a character type Brandon hasn't done much since: the ineffectual but basically well-intentioned man. Elend, maybe, at first. The "Religions of Yolen" appendix, frankly, isn't all that cool compared to the Artes Arcana. Overall ... interesting to read, not a good novel, but, as mentioned above, the author knew that and it'll be heavily rewritten, if Brandon's plans succeed and it finally becomes Hoid's origin story. Bye, Jerick. I hope to see Ryalla again, better written and with a better love interest (if any).

I stopped the audiobook to catch up on 6 hours of podcasts, but this bugged me throughout: Brandon, please stop your characters from abusing their horses. Every time they're supposed to anywhere, the driver/rider "whips" them. That's not how it works. Read Judy Tarr's essays. (https://reactormag.com/the-hard-working-horses-of-epic-fantasy/ and many others.)

It's almost the Monty Python and the Holy Grail scene, where the army is suddenly there, walking up over the line of hills.

A couple of minor things. Ryalla thinks of abuse-victim Courteth as having "gray dun" hair. But dun already means "gray brown", so ... ? When Topaz is leaving after the collapse of the Horwatcher headquarters, does his chariot suddenly materialize? I am listening to the audiobook, it's possible that I just tuned out, but my memory has him return to the ruins after the building is destroyed, and then ride off in a chariot.

I don't know ... finding her body after three months, how would they identify it, let alone know the cause of death, in this setting? And still, why was this guy so personally angry at Bat'Chor? Again, he has to see lots of death, he's in a nation that's part of the thing known as the "Eternal War".

OK, the sequence where Bat'Chor is in the fancy solitary confinement. Why does the angry officer wait three months before suddenly bursting in to explain the backstory and almost kill the prisoner? Wouldn't it make more sense for him to give his angry rant and almost kill Bat'Chor before locking him up? Did he really stay in a state of perpetual, almost-uncontrollable rage for months, somehow? I haven't read any further yet. Was he the victim's lover or something? Why is he so angry over this particular murder? I'm not being heartless, I'm saying that this person is the closest thing to law enforcement in that setting, why is this one murder so important to him?

I have tried three times. I can't get past about chapter 8 of that book. It's the exact form of humor I personally find the least funny. You're right, though, it's another example of the amnesia plot. Hey, Shardcasters! If you ever have a chance to ask Brandon quiz questions again, maybe ask him what Dalinar, Shallan, Hoid, Tress, Yumi, and that guy from FW have in common with that Kandra? See if he knows how often he has gone to the Well of Amnesia. Your followup question could add Jerick.

Anyone can learn it, but Chosen One Protagonist Marty StuJerick is an order of magnitude better than anyone else. Topaz isn't as sharp as Cosmere Hoid. The god he meets accidentally refers to the summoned goddess in the next room (that's a weird phrase) as his sister, but then claims to be her father, in the same brief conversation. Topaz misses it. Does the terrible amnesia plot in this book foreshadow the many amnesia plots of the Stormlight Archive (Shallan, Dalinar, Hoid, probably the Heralds [and certainly Taln in TWOK Prime])? For that matter, Hoid has amnesia again in Tress. And Yumi has it in her eponymous book. And didn't a Kandra lose part of its memory when it lost its spikes in Era 2 of Mistborn? Brandon seemingly has a thing for writing amnesia. I was just reminded today that I'll probably never see Dragonsteel the actual book. It's slated to follow the complete Stormlight Archive. That's minimum 20 years in the future. I'm 62.

Yes, I read WOK Prime, and I think you're right. The last couple hours of audiobook have mostly been the V1 Shattered Plains. I mostly noticed some very incongruous word choices. Bat'Chor encounters the word "museum", which is a reference to Classical Greek beliefs about the Muses, and calls something "infernal", a reference to the Christian Hell. I think Publishable Brandon would have avoided using those words. Over in Ryalla's storyline, she finally just stops having her denial character trait. "OK, now I embrace my light-control powers, and remember what happened in the feasting hall." You know, where she hears the kidnapping of Yoharn planned, but neither she nor Jerick ever thinks to warn the King, who they both like? (Yeah, that bugged me.) The false hope thing where Topaz is literally a few feet from Yoharn and is about to open the door, then gets scared away, wasn't as dramatic as Baby Brandon wanted, at least for me.

Jerick looks like a sort of proto-Kaladin in the Shattered Plains. He is a natural leader, even of men older than himself, he inexplicably gets healthier in the climate of grueling abuse and semi-starvation. He comes from an even lower social standing than Kaladin, and rose even higher even faster before his crash. Of course, this early effort isn't as good--Jerick's rise isn't really believable, for one thing.

I got to the Bridge Four/Shattered Plains stuff. You can definitely see the bones of a good story there, but Baby Brandon didn't execute it as well as the WoK version (unsurprisingly). That said, he's getting better as I listen to the audiobook, which I interpret as him actually learning to write better as he wrote. I'm intrigued by Ryala and Toren getting together. It isn't especially plausible, but I thought Torell was written off. Maybe he gets a redemption arc?

You can tell I'm posting here sort of stream-of-consciousness? If I were inexplicably Brandon Sanderson, I would use this (or chapters from it) in a seminar on how to write fiction. Get the students to do what I'm doing, read through it and explain what they see as flaws in the text, say tell-don't-show. Then I'd have them rewrite a couple of pages, trying to keep early Brandon's style but fix the specific problem they perceive. Then, they'd apply what they learned to their own work. My reasoning is, this isn't atrocious or unfixable, but it is very flawed. IMO, that makes it perfect to practice that sort of editing on. (There are fundamental problems that can't be fixed with such simple revisions, again in my opinion. Jerick is not a great protagonist, for one thing. Brandon is on record that Jerick is unlikely to be around in the eventual published version.)

Well, Ryala could be a proto-Shallan. She Lightweaves (although that word hadn't been coined yet, I think) and is totally unaware that she's doing it. Frost (who actually still has the same name, unlike Topaz) is bound by an oath of some sort. It isn't clear that it's the oath of non-intervention from Stormlight, but it could be. It prevents him from helping the protagonist. Topaz, like Hoid, is utterly unable to harm anyone, so that carried over into the Cosmere. I doubt it's for the same reason. I stalled out just before the halfway point. I'll listen to a few hours of podcasts and then try to get back into it.

Chapter 23 starts with over two pages of Jerick remembering stuff, in a remarkably unexciting way. I have to think this is a first draft. Even very young Brandon wouldn't have left this stuff in, as-is, in a second. Spoilers.

I listened to a little during lunch. Jerick refers to Martis as "very anal" about something in Chapter 21. I know Yolen is advanced and all, but Freudian psychoanalysis? Martis also manages to shout three sentences while a sword is in mid-swing. And finally, the amnesia plot device is detracting from the story, in my arrogant opinion.

... and now Frost is thinking about backstory. We're in his head, but somehow he manages not to think about the things Brandon would rather we didn't know. It's interesting, for sure. It isn't as entertaining as modern Brandon, but it's interesting to someone who is curious about writing and the development of both writers and their works. There's a scene

Chapter 20 starts with two separate viewpoint characters thinking about backstory for about four pages.No kidding, they just think exposition at the reader. Wow, the current Brandon would not do that.

I listened to a few more hours. There are several more times where the story just called makeup "makeup". I think that, if Brandon had chosen to polish this one instead of Elantris, he'd have talked to someone who knew about makeup and used more description. Is she wearing blush? Mascara? Lipstick/lip gloss? White powder to make her look pale? To the best of my memory, the word is only ever applied to one character, too, which to me feels odd, as if in the Stormlight Archive, only Adolin's clothing ever got described. In the threadstarter, I mentioned how odd I found the use of "coat" referring to makeup. Later someone "paints" makeup onto a woman's face. (The idea of men wearing makeup seems never to have occurred to anyone on Yolen.) There's a court intrigue plot that uses a huge part of the plot (remember that I'm not halfway through yet), but Brandon is also trying to set up the fainlife plot. At this point, he wasn't as good at connecting the various plots in a long story. (Again, he knew this and taught himself to do it much better.) "Tell don't show" continues, with very "early writer" stuff happening. Too many chapters start with characters thinking about the backstory to familiarize the reader. It isn't terrible, but it's clearly not the work of an experienced pro, which is hardly a surprise.

I'm listening to the audiobook of Dragonsteel Prime. It's clearly even earlier than Way of Kings Prime. There are stylistic things and just plain bad wording that Brandon-today would never use. I mean, "face coated with makeup"? It isn't mockery, this is a character described as beautiful. There are structural problems, or just plain lack of continuity. The first part has Jerick's friends. Then in the next part, he's described as a solitary kid who really didn't have friends. There's a surprising amount of "tell, don't show" once we get to the palace, too. This isn't mockery of Brandon, not even pre-publication Brandon who wrote this. He was (as he says) aware it wasn't ready for publication. Presumably, that's why he was selling Elantris and Mistborn and not Dragonsteel. It just makes me feel better about my own writing, that Brandon Sanderson's earliest efforts were very much in need of improvement. It's actually a compliment--Brandon worked hard to get as good as he is. I would also say that even in this not-ready-for-prime-time thing, you can see Brandon's inventiveness shining through. It's weird to me, to read a Sanderson fantasy, get 20% or so through it, and know almost nothing about any magic system. Not bad, but interesting. Note; it's a 27 hour audiobook. I won't finish it for a bit.

I suddenly remembered that I know Moshe Feder, Brandon's editor, slightly. He is getting it fixed.

Any beta readers, or others who have access to someone on Brandon's team? The "Pre-order the book" page (https://read.macmillan.com/torforge/the-stormlight-archive/ ) has a "Pre-Order Now" dropdown and a "Buy the Stormlight Archive" dropdown. The Pre-order dropdown has a link to Indigo, which is selling, quote, "Tor Fall 2024 Title to Be Announced". None, zero, of the preorder links let me buy a DRM-free epub. That's what I actually want, so .... The Buy dropdown is worse. There are two Barnes & Noble links. One goes to Apple Books, and one goes to nowhere, because the URL in the hyperlink runs two bookstores together. The Apple link leads to Books-a-Million. The Books-a-Million link leads to BAM as well. The Target link leads to Indigo. It's a real mess. I realize that this is a Macmillan site, not Dragonsteel, but a call from, say, JABberwocky (Brandon's agents) would definitely wake them up. Note that I did try the Contact page at https://brandonsanderson.com, but Cloudflare times out without showing it. Thanks.

Eric has no ego! His favorite secret project isn't the one that namechecks him. Sig has found a way to hack the Torment, which Hoid in all his millennia seemingly never has. Will he share the trick? So both Tress and Sunlit Man have a climax in a spaceship? My favorite moment: Sigzil recreating years of the Scadrian scientists' work in minutes while they keep asking if he read their notes. Around 1:25:50, David's talking about the Shades forming a giant mass ... if you put enough Investiture in one place, it develops sapience, says Brandon. Would the Chorus (made of mostly-mindless shades) develop a collective intelligence just by virtue of having so much Investiture gathered together? The planetary core is apparently super-dense because of so much Investiture. So wouldn't it become sentient or even sapient? For that matter, why aren't Taldain's and Canticle's stars sentient? Or are they? Eric (1:43:29), you don't think Brandon is heavily foreshadowing Cultivation dying? Or at least Koravellium Avast? She has really good futuresight and she's putting a lot of work into making an heir .... Least favorite point: the Cinder King is the weakest villain I've seen from Brandon. He's so two-dimensional you should be able to see through him. Compare, "I'm insecure so I need all the power" boy to the Lord Ruler, or Bluefingers, or Torol Sadeas. The 'casters don't think that was important, of course.

Yes. In fact, it originated before the Shattering, when Virtuosity was a component of the living Adonalsium.

So ... does it seem to anyone else that the Shades of Threnody, the Nightmares of Torio, and the creatures of the Midnight Essence are connected? Nightmares and Shades are both the Cognitive Shadows of people who died on that world, and remain to prey on the living. They both have visual similarities to the Midnight Essence, which strangely can be created by the Unmade Re-Shephir and (in Tress and the non-canon Aether of Night draft) by a black Aether.