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Aww, Thanks for the compliments. If I have time maybe I will flesh this out into something presentable to give to Brandon at the next signing, since it looks like I'll be able to make it to one of the Shadows of Self tour stops. I wonder if anyone with actual art skills wants to contribute some Seussian illustrations. Hmmm. @Mrs. K. I am glad you approve. I feel like I've been slacking in my squirely duties.

No wonder the red eyes are a bad sign.Words of Radiance:

(Note: an updated version can be found here.) Dr. Seuss One spren, two spren, Lie spren, truth spren. Are the blue spren truly glue spren? This one makes a skyeel fly, That one shows up when you die. Oh what a lot of spren I spy! You have light in your spheres, You have shards in your hand, You have surges to help you to fly and to land! So where will you go? Somewhere high? Somewhere low? To the great Reshi Isles, or somewhere with snow? Perhaps you will dine on some Horneater Stew, Delivered directly through Urithiru. Or maybe the Shin will sell you a chicken (eating it helps Thaylen eyebrows to thicken). There’s so many places and people and spren, It’s easy to wonder just where your path ends. But please, don’t forget, it’s the way that you walk that matters much more than the place that you stop. Yes, the road that you take, whether straight, curved, or bendy always matters the most—just ask the Parshendi.

That's correct. And at the board navigation level the Aon doesn't change, but bold still means something new had been added.

...but if you try this at the board level (e.g. "Cosmere Theories" or "17th Shard Discussion") it marks everything in that board as read. A useful feature sometimes, but not if you think is going to take you to an unread post.

I'll probably be there. I'm moving to Boston around that time, and I'll try to make it work. If my schedule permits, I'd love to do a meet-up with dinner etc.

Thanks for the great rundown Weiry & Tellingdwar! As a fan of coop games, I am intrigued by the incentives produced by the most-favor-wins vs least-favor-wins outcome possibilities. This will be on my to-get list soon.

The amount of power involved in generating light varies dramatically with how you do it. An LED takes about 6W to make the same amount of light as a 60W incandescent bulb, and the heating elements in a toaster oven take about a 1000W and generate substantially less light than that. (Incidentally, a burning candle--the point of comparison for brightness in-world--is ~100x less efficient than an incandescent bulb). While "indefinitely" was hyperbole, I believe that the glow of stormlight is closer to an LED's efficiency, and the light generation is a minimal cost on its power. This is an important point, and I don't have a good answer. Shallan makes a similar observation about Pattern when she is practicing her lightweaving, so it seems to be a general feature that latent stormlight glows more than "in-use" stormlight. It just seems to me that the energy it takes to make a sphere glow like a candle for two weeks (their apparent limit given the Weeping, if we assume the glowing is what uses up the energy) must be far less than the amount to make a giant stone fall the wrong way, stick a Herdazian to a wall, transmute a human into crystal, or heal someone who fell off a cliff. To be honest, it is the healing that gives me the most trouble. I could buy the idea that surges are really just making changes on the spiritual realm, for example convincing an object that gravity is pointing the other direction. In that model the stormlight doesn't have to accelerate the object at all, instead letting "gravity" do the real energetic work. But instant healing when you get stabbed in the heart, or regrowing body parts, seems to be a direct effect of the stormlight itself.

I'm not going to chime in on the math part today, but I do want to contend one point. I used to agree with this, but I no longer think it is the case. In my opinion, Stormlight is analogous to the mists in Mistborn: a gaseous form of investiture. On Roshar this gas glows, but the act of glowing doesn't cost much energy and doesn't substantially reduce the amount of Stormlight in a gem or person. Wisps of gas do escape from imperfect containers, and this happens more quickly (and therefore visibly) from proto-Radiants and those with Honorblades, but the glow is more an indication that loss is occurring.Since I assume the amount of light given off per unit of Stormlight is constant, the brightness of a gem is directly indicative of the power it contains, and if a gem were a perfect vessel for Stormlight I believe it would continue to glow indefinitely.

This has happened to me a number of times, and I almost always choose to finish the book. I've mildly regretted that about a third of the time, wishing for my time back, and strongly regretted it 2 or 3 times, wishing to get it out of my brain. I've never regretted abandoning a book, but in fairness I haven't done that very often.

I'll be in the process of relocating to Boston at that point, so I may be able to make the Brookline event as well.

Good point. I have two versions that I can't decide between. The simple explanation is that you use 3 lines instead of two, and they don't quite touch. That would mean it looks like -|- more than +. The other possibility is that it takes a second for the drawn line to project its force field vertically, which gives a brief grace period to draw the full cross. Given that Harding's bullet was stopped by a hastily drawn LoF, this can't be a usual feature. However, since we know the Rithmatist's intent matters, it is possible that when they are planning to construct a Mark's Cross they subconsciously (or maybe intentionally) instruct the first LoF to not become complete until they draw the intersecting line.

Great Gatsby?

More answers! (I'll come back and edit the multi-parters into Q&A format when I have some more time.) Hmm, pretty sure we already had a question on this before. (related to this thread)

I got a response about this from the AMA on reddit: So the jury is officially still out on this. That it was worth RAFOing makes me think there may be something going on here, but at the same time he could just be trying to keep us guessing.

Do the characters understand how it all works? If it is just an explanation for your world building but the characters find the magic mysterious, I think it's totally okay to leave it mysterious for the reader, possibly providing a few circumstantial hints. If the mechanics of the magic are well known in-world, but you don't want to focus on the why of it, I think the best approach is bits and pieces along the way (rather than an up-front explanation). Alternatively, if it matters in-world (e.g. they have a medical test where they can screen the population and find out what powers you might get; OR they just installed water sanitation plants, and suddenly a bunch of people's magic doesn't work any more) then an early scene or two experiencing/discussing that would be appropriate.

It may or may not be Hoid specifically. That face appears before chapters when Hoid is present or discussed, but also when other worldhoppers appear and Hoid is nowhere to be seen. In the Tor reread posts that face is called the "jester", which could mean Hoid specifically in his role as King's Wit, but could also be a more general "wildcard" indicating that something out-of-the-norm is occurring.

No, I agree. I'm just wondering if these guys were an additional team sent to take her out, as insurance in case Kabsal's more subtle approach didn't work. (Or sent by another party. As Jasnah tells Shallan, "there are many groups searching for these secrets.") I am assuming that if these thugs are in fact ghostblood agents, their deaths are just adding to Jasnah's previous body count, and the group is already very annoyed at her. Re: the morality debate, thank you maxal for bringing up that WoB. Here is the actual quote: (source) For the purposes of this thread, however right or wrong you think Jasnah was, the implication of the quote is that Brandon doesn't view her actions in as "something that needed to be done," which tends to support the "just a regular old mugging" explanation. I'm not fully convinced yet, and I will keep my eyes open for more evidence either way.

Maybe it has to come through water regardless, but some people sweat a lot so the sun is automatically filtered through water for them? I'll have to think about some other options. What sort of powers do they access this way?

One turning point in WoK is the lesson Jasnah gives Shallan in practical philosophy. To all appearances, these two protoRadiants are accosted by thugs looking to gain a few spheres through a simple mugging. But this is long before either we or Shallan have an inkling of Roshar's secret society undercurrents. It becomes clear in WoR that Jasnah is (with good reason) actively guarding against attempts on her life by at least one shadowy organization. Mraize later tells Shallan that Jasnah had already killed several members of the Ghostbloods. I wonder, then, whether the obvious premeditation behind the "philosophy lesson" did not have an ulterior purpose. Were the "thugs" actually would-be assassins who were specifically targeting Jasnah? Jasnah tells Shallan that she chose their alleyway based on reports of muggings and murders in the area. This could well be true, and she chose to kill the miscreants to make the city safer. Perhaps it was a favor to kind old Taravangian, who doesn't have the resources to protect his citizens. Perhaps it was more personal, and (as some have speculated) she bears a grudge against people who take advantage of women--past trauma fueling rage against these individuals. Then again, this reasoning that Jasnah presents could be either wholly fabricated or simply incidental to her real purpose. Perhaps she (or Ivory) had identified a tail following her around. Maybe the alley she went to didn't matter, she was just finding a place isolated enough for them to make their move. We don't get to see their bodies after the event, so we don't know if they had ghostblood tattoos or not. Even if they didn't they could have been hired for the hit, like Tyn, or be members of another secret society. Am I missing any evidence that would suggest that the event was simply a mugging-gone-wrong? Or evidence that the thugs had a very specific victim in mind?

I love the implementation (and the way many Sharders have emulated its effect in their own posting), but sometimes the profanity filter on this site can be a bit confusing.

More Answers! I love this! Does anyone know at what point this has or will set the record for longest-running AMA?

More Answers! http://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/2ytg2h/im_novelist_brandon_sanderson_ama/ctqgwyn?context=3 http://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/2ytg2h/im_novelist_brandon_sanderson_ama/ctqh4aj?context=3 http://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/2ytg2h/im_novelist_brandon_sanderson_ama/ctqh8a4?context=3 http://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/2ytg2h/im_novelist_brandon_sanderson_ama/ctqrmat?context=3 http://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/2ytg2h/im_novelist_brandon_sanderson_ama/ctqrml7?context=3 http://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/2ytg2h/im_novelist_brandon_sanderson_ama/ctqvenf?context=3

I just want to say that I love this expression. I disagree. It has "just about anyone who thinks magic is cool or useful" written all over it. Nearly every theory post on this site has guesses on how to implement magic to achieve certain effects, or speculation about what would happen if <blank>. From that I assume that trying to push the limits of a magic system is a fairly common response for anyone who knows a bit about how things work. I'm not saying that Hoid doesn't have his hand in a lot of pies, but I am saying that we (on the 17th) seem to be inordinately focused on this one especially visible worldhopper. Among other things, Stormlight Archive has demonstrated that there are all sorts of investiture-savvy people traipsing across the cosmere with their own particular motives. Brandon has confirmed that other worldhoppers (some that we've identified, some still not) are peppered through his earlier works. I think it's a mistake to automatically ascribe cross-shardworld pollination of ideas to Hoid. (Unless, of course, you used all-caps for HOID to indicate it as the acronym for the Hacking Odium's Investiture Directly interest group, in which case you may be quite correct.)

Joe, wouldn't all of the disembodied shades be able to easily take over the bodies of those who had sacrificed their minds? And then it wouldn't even be their own body, so they would be more likely to do another giant physical spell and repeat. Sounds to me like the mental mages sacrifice a lot more than the others, and you have some ever-living physical mages who keep getting more powerful and proficient. I've tried writing a magic system that has basically your same spiritual cost (though very different powers) and I had trouble making it work well. I'd be interested in seeing how you do it. (I think my problem was that I wasn't letting it cost enough, since I wanted the character to be unaware of what was happening until quite a ways in.)