ccstat

I already sent these question suggestions to Jof in a PM. I'll add them here. Have an awesome time at the con!

Great question! The short answer is no, that doesn't hurt the authors. I don't remember the numbers, but authors get a royalty based on the number of readers who get a book via Kindle Unlimited, just like we get a percentage off of each book sold. Basically, we may not make as much in royalties from a KU reader as from someone who buys the book, but the value of having you read the book is much greater than the loose change that trickles in from a single book sale. (This is especially true for things like this anthology, where the royalties get split between the contributing authors.) The important part is to have readers tell their friends when they like something, so that word will spread. You are never going to single handedly support an author by buying their books. But if you convince someone else to get my book, you've just doubled the royalty I would have gotten from you. If you get my book from a library and tell people you liked it, that's just as good. If you want to help the authors you like, the very best thing to do is buy a copy of the book for every person you know. In the event that you can't do that for every book release, there are three things that are almost as good. First, tell your friends. Recommendations from someone they trust are the most likely to get them interested in a book. Second, rate the book on Amazon (or other book merchant) and on Goodreads. Those sites influence a lot of people's buying decisions, so your recommendation will have the farthest reach there. Also, at least on Amazon, there are set thresholds for the number of ratings a book has to have before they will market it in certain ways. For example, once a book has 50 reviews it will start to show up under other books in the "People also read..." section. Third, if you plan to buy the book, buy it on release day. Release-week sale numbers tell publishers how much effort to put into marketing a book, and those numbers determine placement in best-seller lists, which is huge for visibility. (This one isn't as important in my case since Unspun is being published by a small indie press that has already made all the marketing allocations it plans to. Also because I don't have a publication backlist that would get a boost from having my name on a high-selling list.) Disclaimer: This is the first piece of writing that i am actually selling to people for money, so it's possible there are additional moving parts here I don't know about.

You've been added to the map. What problems do you mean? I'm guessing that you don't hold issue with the map project since you volunteered your location.

Awesome! I'm excited to share it, and I'm stoked about being everyone's first impression of the anthology. I have been wanting to ask the editor what factors went into deciding the order of the stories. Mine is the longest of the short-story-length pieces (7400 words) and one of the better ones (I might be biased), but I don't know if those factors were important, or if the order was determined more by tone (silly vs adventurous vs introspective), pagination to get the illustrations on the right pages, or something else entirely. It's silly, but one of the things I'm really looking forward to is the little "goodreads author" badge that I get to claim. And, of course, the instant fame and fortune that come from being a published author. Can't forget that. And yeah, CC are my initials. I've frequently considered switching to something more easily parsed or pronounced, but haven't settled on anything I like. I've used that username for everything social for almost 20 years (good grief!) primarily because it is unique and therefore available on any new site I join. Usually people who see that ccstat think I really like statistics, but it originally comes from a high school joke when a friend quoted a medical-based TV show, "give me 50 cc's, stat!"

The Amazon and Goodreads pages are live now! Links added to the OP. The ebook ($5) can be pre-ordered now, and the print version ($13) will be available for order on April 10. Pinging @Argent and @Extesian, who wanted to be notified.

I'm not the one to decide, but this didn't seem out of place to me. With Dalinar and Navani's wedding those family relationships got a bit more complicated. Add in that Jasnah tends to speak formally, and I don't think it's odd for her to say "my mother" to her uncle/step-dad even when Navani is present.

Not yet, but it will be soon. It is a small press, and last I heard the ISBN was still pending or something like that. As soon as it goes up on Goodreads I'll post a link.

A lot of good points @Subvisual Haze, though I'm hesitant to rely too much on the details of that system chart. It doesn't strike me as a particularly technical document. I do like your analysis of the orbit eccentricities and orientations, and it that makes a lot of sense. I particularly like your idea that Salas' "hesitance" is related to its slower velocity at moonrise. I'll have to take a closer look at how different periapsis points would influence the relative timing of the moons. For now, I think you are definitely on to something. Changing the length of the moonless "hour" may help the timing some, but for me the main problem is that east-west variation. In accounting for the breadth of the continent, and therefore the different time zones, it still appears that in Shinovar the hateful hour ought to occur in mid-afternoon, rather than after sunset when it could actually be dark.

I’m getting published! A short story I wrote is coming out in the anthology Unspun: A Collection of Tattered Fairy Tales, which is being released on April 10. I’ve read all the pieces and highly recommend the book. My story is called "Heart of a Thief" and follows the man who bought Jack's cow for a handful of magic beans. I had a lot of fun figuring out why someone would make such a purchase. Hopefully you will too! Edit: The book it's now available for order on Amazon and is listed on Goodreads. Here are the basics: Unspun is a collection of short stories about what comes after the “ever after” of classic fairy tales. You can learn more in my blog posts about the collection and about my story. Here is the publisher’s description: I want to gush for a moment about some of the other stories in Unspun. There are three that by themselves make this absolutely worth buying. One of these is a novella by Katherine Cowley. It is based on the less well-known fairy tale of Tatterhood, who is an ugly princess with a magic wooden spoon. The storytelling and worldbuilding and magic of Cowley's story are an excellent fit for Sanderfans, and the story itself is wonderful. It's about beauty and acceptance, about marriage and loyalty, and about coming to know yourself and others. Plus it features Tatterhood's awesome sidekick, a parkour-loving goat. Another fantastic piece in the anthology is by Jeanna Mason Stay and is about Gretel dealing with PTSD after what she experienced in the gingerbread house. The prose is simply beautiful and I love how every word puts you right in Gretel's mind. Jeanna wrote about the anthology on her blog here. The other story I love is by Kaki Olsen and based on The Nutcracker. The main character inherits the nutcracker from her mother and has to deal with the discovery of its magic at the same time she is dealing with her grief over her mother's death. The way her emotional state intersects with the excitement of the plot is perfect, and I really want to read more stories about these characters. Those are my three favorites, but the rest are also great. The pied piper tries to figure out what to do with the children following him, Prince Ivan's mother tries to understand how her unpromising son acquired a firebird and a wife during her short absence, and the little mermaid (now just sea foam) tries to speak to her family. There are also stories based on Rumplestiltskin, Snow White, and the Princess and the Pea. I am thrilled to have my story included with them. Overall the collection contains two novellas, seven short stories, and two shorter works (a poem and a piece of flash fiction). In addition, the cover artist drew illustrations to accompany each piece, which is something I am extra excited about. My experience with the editors was wonderful, and I can't wait to see the actual finished product. It will be available on release day in both print and ebook, and I hope you love it!

Ack! Thanks for the correction. I was mis-remembering, which is sad since that was my own question.

A bunch of great questions. I'm particularly curious about that kandra one. This is an interesting pair of answers. I suspect that he is just holding back on telling us listener abilities until it becomes relevant in the text, so that he can have some surprises for the books. My personal guess is that the listeners cannot generally sense bronze-pulses, though certain forms could gain this ability. My reasoning: we know that Kokerlii masks cognitive activity, while the rhythms originate in the spiritual realm and can't be blocked by a coppercloud (source). So if listeners can sense kinetic investiture, it wouldn't be by the same mechanism in which they hear the rhythms. Then again, we don't actually know where bronze pulses come from (unless I've forgotten an important WoB somewhere). The best theory I've seen is that they arise from the transfer of investiture between realms, which is (probably) what makes the investiture "kinetic" in the first place. So I'm not sure why Kokerlii's ability would mask such pulses. My other line of reasoning contains Oathbringer spoilers: EDIT: yeah, got that blocking rhythms thing wrong. Oops.

You probably saw this already, but Brandon had said giant chalklings are a possibility (source)

Great! I appreciate the clarification, Chaos. @Extesian Thanks for the support and kind words. I'm really excited for my first publication, and I'm quite happy with how the story turned out, especially since most of my writing to this point has been either novel-length or poetry, and I haven't explored the short-story form nearly as much. I'll post specifics when the book is actually available, but in short the anthology is a collection of fairy tale adaptations looking at what happens "after the Ever After." I've read most of the other stories in the collection and they have all been excellent. There are a wide variety of approaches to the theme, and the authors draw on both familiar and non-traditional fairy tales, so I have no reservations recommending it. I'll make sure to read the remaining pieces by the time of release so that I can vouch for the anthology as a whole. My story is based on Jack and the Beanstalk and follows the old man who sold Jack the magic beans.

I remember seeing this addressed in the forum rules at some point, but can't find that section now. Could someone please clarify the policy or point me to it? I have a short story being published in an anthology next month, and I'd like to promote it by making a thread in Creator's Corner, mentioning it on Discord, etc. but I want to make sure I don't violate any forum etiquette or rules in doing so.

I agree with what been said so far. These aren't the best examples of graphic novels, and I don't feel the need to own them. But that is partly because my public library has physical and digital copies that I can borrow. I definitely recommend trying it if you can read the story for free.

I'll post my reactions later, but I want to link to the ebook copy on Hoopla. If your library has a Hoopla subscription, you can read it there.

Ebook, page 106, center panel. Kenton's dialog attributed to an assassin. ("We can discuss that once...")

Thanks to the Tor.com reread, I found out that "blood of my fathers" isn't new from Oathbringer. It wasn't on my earlier list, but it shows up frequently in WoK used by Dalinar, Amaram, and Moash.

I spent some more time on the letters today, and I think you are right about these altered characters. There are other places where the letters are simply scrunched rather than altering the top stroke, so I don't understand how the artist chose to handle each case--why not scrunch these, or alter the others instead? I guess it doesn't really matter. Yeah, it could be anything really. V still looks close to me, but H makes a lot of sense with the top-stroke flip. I suspect we will need to guess it from a viable translation. With that in mind, and assuming J=G, that top section (?LGFT) looks like it could end with "...gified" or "...gaped" or "__ gift". Nothing I try for the first half makes sense with any of those though. I think you are right about the thaylen letters, but the reasoning doesn't make much sense to me. If vowels have diminished importance in both written and spoken Thaylen, then I would expect consonants to carry more information content, and therefore to have more variation / fewer "redundancies." But that's neither here nor there. Word length of actual Thaylen could be long enough to make up for it. EDIT: Okay, I tried to arrange the letters we know into a chart where relationships between similar characters could stand out. Each column roughly shares the bottom/core element, and each row shares the (potentially mutable) top stroke. Grayed out letters for N, H, and Z are ones we saw in the Thaylen map border but don't feature on the mythica border. The grayed S is an extrapolation of the stroke-flip rule if it applies to that letter. We also have three unknowns: the maybe-an-H from the top row, and two letters that are partially obscured in the bottom right corner.

Excellent insight! I'm convinced you are correct about the upside-down P characters being J instead. As you point out, it would be an intermediate between the Thaylen letter J and the glyph element for J, so that makes a lot of sense. And it very conveniently gives us Sja-Anat in the border. I examined the rest of the letters again: P/J are the only ones that have an apparent vertical reflection. R, K, and S each occur a bunch of times, always in the same orientation. L, V (presumed), and Sh (presumed) occur only once, in the expected orientation. P, J, T, N, occur in both the "normal" orientation (from the glyph elements chart and Frostlands map), and a horizontal reflection. These last letters that get reflected freely are the ones that have redundancies in English, so I'm tempted to assign, e.g. T and D to different versions of their character. However, we have confirmation from the artist that "corrupted" is part of the border, and both places where it might occur use a repeated character that has to be transliterated as both T and D. So I provisionally conclude that these horizontal reflections are purely artistic and we are free to use either redundant letter in each case. The part I'm not comfortable with yet is the characters you reinterpreted with asterisks. Your translation makes a lot of sense, and it would be convenient if they could be read the way you propose, but it doesn't make sense that the characters would be as mutable as that. Why would an R, to take the asterisk character in your proposed "secrets," be written identically six times around the border, but for the seventh occurrence it gets twisted around strangely? If that sort of alteration is possible, then that same character could just as easily be a Z or N. You could be right, but it makes me cringe a bit. With that in mind, though, I could make a weak case for it by calling it artistic license--the border describes a powerful spren known for "twisted creations," and certain letters could be intentionally distorted to convey the sense of wrongness that comes from the corruption of her touch. Also, it is hard to propose an alternative to your asterisked N. The right side clearly says Sja-Anat now that we've assigned the J correctly; the left side mirrors it except that the N appears to have been replaced with a Z. If SJNT = Sja-Anat, what could SJZT be? It's definitely easier to think that some sort of distortion is happening and the letter is intended as an N. That is how I'm currently interpreting them. They look like artistic spacers more than anything. Still could be W though. I tried to guess some more at the letters obscured by other things. Combining those guesses with your proposals, this is what we have so far. Asterisks are reinterpreted characters. Parentheses are questionable assignments. I'm still not sold on those asterisks, but I don't have a good counterproposal at the moment.

Since the moons are small, I have in mind that they won't be affecting tides very much. I don't have a good enough grasp of the relevant factors to say for sure though. I thought to check how small the moons actually are. Peter has said that Phobos (11 km across) is the right ballpark, so let's start there. Our own moon has an angular size of about half a degree in the sky. Assuming a closest approach of 2R, a Phobos-sized moon would reach a maximum angular size of 0.05 degrees. To appear as large as our moon, a body would need to be more like 100km across. Phobos weighs 10^16 kg, so 100 km moon of similar composition would be ~10^18 kg. In comparison to Roshar's mass of 3x10^24 kg that is still very small, but it might be big enough at these distances to cause tidal effects? I'm not sure. [EDIT: I used this online calculator to figure out tidal forces. Plugging in the numbers for Roshar and this hypothetical 100 km moon, it says that the average tidal force would be 3% of our moon's. Tidal force decreases with the cube of the distance, though, so at periapsis it would be significantly more than that. Using the orbit I've been dealing with (eccentricity=0.45) the tidal force at periapsis would be 20% of our moon's. If you increase the eccentricity to 0.68, periapsis gets you the same tidal force as our moon. I still don't know enough about tides to understand what that varying force (arising from the eccentric orbit) would do. I'm inclined to think that because the moons orbit with a period of exactly one day that there would be resonant effects and the tides would be larger than you might expect from only e.g. 20% of the force.] (Incidentally, seen from Mars Phobos has an angular size of 0.1 degrees, and orbits a bit less than 2 Martian radii from the surface.) I think it's reasonable to have the moons (at periapsis) appear between 10% and 100% the size of ours in the sky, so we can probably conclude that all three moons are somewhere in the range of 10-100 km across, (they can tend to the smaller end if we go with a more elliptical orbit). We had a discussion on Discord yesterday where I was reminded that Roshar is still rotating relative to the moons' orbits, a factor that was omitted from my previous visibility time considerations. This has two major effects. The first is that the moons cross the sky twice, once during the day and once at night. With the eccentricity we are considering for the orbits, the moons at their smallest will be 20-25% of their maximum size. (That is, if Nomon at periapsis looks as big as our moon with an angular size of 0.5 degrees, then at apoapsis during the day it should look about one fifth as large with an angular size of 0.1 degrees.) The second effect is that the visibility times are shortened a bit compared to what I calculated. The correction for Roshar's rotation will have the biggest effect when the moons are moving slowly (especially during the day) and the smallest effect when they are moving quickly (for observers in central Roshar). Consequently, the visibility times for central and coastal Roshar will even out a little bit from the disparity calculated before. Unfortunately, this also exacerbates the time zone issue. Regarding the complete absence of daytime moon sightings by our characters, there is no way that people haven't noticed but I find it reasonable to suggest they don't care much. One suggestion on how to make the daytime moon appearances less prominent was to give the orbits a sharp inclination. I calculated the highest position in the sky for a day and night moon at various inclinations, when observed from either the equator or from a latitude of 45 degrees South (hopefully the chart formatting will work here). Angles given indicate degrees above the horizon, so 90=zenith, 0=at horizon. I've rounded off to the nearest 5 degrees, so we don't get too distracted by details. Inclination of Orbit Observer at equator Observer at 45 S Night Day Night Day 0 90 90 30 40 10 75 75 45 30 25 60 60 60 10 45 30 40 90 below horizon The upshot is that an inclined orbit won't make any difference for people near the equator, but further south (where most of our cities are) it could matter a lot. The inclination needs to be at least 20 degrees before it has a real impact, though.

Okay, this is embarrassing. I just caught a dumb mistake in my calculations from yesterday. (I somehow doubled Roshar's radius when I graphed it out.) Correction: Now the example orbit is not quite as close: 2R at closest approach (rather than 0.5R). This means it rises in Shinovar just after setting in Alethkar. (So we've gained a buffer of one hour, not two, in our time zone considerations.) The increased distance also means that the change in apparent size, while still substantial, is less dramatic. Nothing is going to triple in size, though it can still come close for some locations. Approximately doubling in size won't be uncommon. The visibility times don't change drastically from what I posted before. Add half an hour for coastal observers, three quarters of an hour for central observers.

Either I've misunderstood you or there is a math error here. Never mind, it was my error. Your numbers are correct. I misread your semi-major axis from the other thread as km rather than m. (For the record, in kilometers your numbers from the previous thread are radius=5740 km and semi-major axis=30,890 km). I can confirm that with the eccentricity we settled on in the previous thread, the moons should approach well within 1R at closest approach. That makes sense but wow, that's a close orbit. In light of this, it turns out that my visibility calculations from before are way off. I ignored displacement across the planet, and the effective horizon; it was negligible when I thought the orbit was 1000 times bigger than it actually is, but now it definitely has to be factored in. At first glance it will help substantially. The shared visibility between Alethkar and Shinovar is completely eliminated, even for a circular orbit. We need to recalculate the eccentricity in light of this, and the visibility times. I'm working on the calculations now, and will post when they are ready. ===EDIT=== Calculations: (NOTE--I've made an error here. See my next post for corrections.) Okay, here are the numbers. They are better in some ways, but the increased detail reveals some more complication that I'm not entirely sure what to do with. The first upside is that the moons are close enough that they are never visible to the entire continent at once, no matter how eccentric the orbit. Depending on the details, moonrise in Shinovar is up to an hour after moonset in Alethkar. The complication is that the moons spend very different amounts of time in the sky depending on the observer's location. Using the fairly eccentric orbit from the first thread (which actually brings the moon to an altitude of ~0.5R), an observer directly below periapsis would see the moon cross the sky in 2 hours. Assuming that happens in the center of the continent, an observer at either coast would have 4.8 hours between moonrise and moonset. With a less eccentric orbit the times only get longer. We can make the orbits more eccentric, but then the moons are passing ridiculously close to the surface of the planet. If we go super extreme and let a moon get within 0.2R (~1000km), then the same periapsis observer sees it rise and set in 1 hour, while the coastal observer gets 3 hours of moon time. For comparison, note that with a circular orbit the moons would still be close enough (1.6R) that they would rise and set in 7.5 hours; this would be true everywhere on the planet. On a separate note, the distance of the moon from a given observer (and therefore its apparent size) changes a lot as it travels across the sky. Even if the orbit was circular, the moons are close enough that they would grow by 50% from moonrise to moonheight. If we take the same orbit as before (the one that reaches 0.5R over central Roshar), our central Rosharan would see the moon more than double in size, while a coastal observer would see it more than triple. So far nobody in-world has remarked on this except for Wit's "It was a night when the moons were large" comment, which doesn't quite convey the same idea. CONCLUSIONS: These moons are practically grazing the surface of the planet in order to get across the sky in under 2 hours. There is no way that everyone on Roshar experiences the same moon schedule. Those living near periapsis are likely to see a moon for less than half the time compared to distant observers. We don't need to be quite as concerned about the time zone issue, since the moons can't be seen by the whole continent at once.** The apparent size of these moons is going to vary dramatically as they cross the sky. **Edit2--Clarification on why the time zone concerns are less die: Before, it seemed like the moons would rise in Shinovar at least an hour before they set in Alethkar, which put Salas rising around 2pm local time. Now they rise in Shinovar up to an hour after setting in Alethkar, which buys us an extra 2 hours and Salas now rises just an hour before sundown local time and probably stays in the sky for an hour or two after sundown, making the Shin experience of Salas much more similar to what we've seen from Salas in the east.

Great work collecting those quotes, @Jofwu. I'm inclined to agree with you that the speed of Salas was retconned (or just in error in that first scene) from several hours to a bit over one hour, but as you mentioned that makes moonrise in western Roshar even more problematic than it already was. Here are the seals from the Vev and Jes endpages, and the moons behind Ishar (clearly a more fanciful rendition that won't help with timing): From the spacing, I'm not entirely convinced that the position corresponds (accurately) with each moon's appearance. I would have expected Nomon to be further from Salas to account for the moonless hour. I'll need to look at it a bit more closely, together with the textual references. Since all three moons have a period of one day and are visible near periapsis, a more elliptical orbit will mean a faster transit of the sky, while a less elliptical orbit will mean a longer time spent in the sky. It does appear from the AU chart that Mishim has the most circular of the three orbits--so it being slowest to cross the sky makes sense. It is worth pointing out that along with different moonrise times relative to sundown, the amount of time a moon spends in the sky will change based on how far east or west the observer stands. Moons travel fastest at periapsis, and slow down considerably away from that point. Without knowing where periapsis falls for each moon we can only apply it as a fudge factor, but in general moons should rise slower than they set in Alethkar, and conversely set slower than they rise in Shinovar. I agree that Salas needs to take more than an hour, but 2.5 seems long. I'm inclined to put it around 1.5, which means Nomon would rise ~2 hours before midnight. Say Nomon takes 3 hours, and Mishim takes 3.5, setting about half an hour before dawn. Just spit-balling at the moment--again, I'll have to look at it a bit more closely. Good catch on the clock system. I don't think there's any need to mess around with overlap from day bells and night bells. Yes, dinner an hour before sunset seems early, but I suspect that's a lighteyes/nobles thing. The highprinces seem to have feasts every few days that last well into the night. I'm guessing "dinner" is a light meal for them and they eat again while entertaining or being entertained in the evenings. A working class family would probably order their time differently. If the continent extends only to 60 degrees south then latitude won't gain us more than 20 minutes of leeway on sunrise/set. From what I found online, it's only when you approach 80 degrees or so that things really start to shift around. A more refractive atmosphere could extend daylight a bit, but I'm not sure that would actually make much difference. They seem to have fairly accurate and consistent clocks, which makes me think that their hours are well defined and wouldn't alter the bell system much. I think those are just the surges associated with the polestone essences, rendered artistically as "2 each" rather than "2 each with adjacent essences sharing one".

That's my impression after starting your suggested quote compilation. I only have WoK and Edgedancer on ebook right now, but I'll get WoR and OB from my library to search for references. Here is every mention of the moons from the two I have, organized chronologically though a given night. I tried to include the location of the observation and any available time markers.