Brandon Sanderson's Blog, page 44

Annotation The Alloy of Law Chapter Fourteen

Here is the second batch of annotations for The Alloy of Law. As with all of the other annotations here on the site, each annotation contains spoilers for the current chapter. Spoilers for chapters after the current one are hidden by spoiler tags. We recommend you read the book before reading the annotations!

They Visit Ranette

Ranette was a late addition to the story. I didn’t start building her until I was working on chapter ten or so. (All earlier references to her were added in during revisions.)

I was feeling there was a hole in the story, that it needed one more character, probably a woman. I also wanted to add a gunsmith to the book, and so I started working on who she would be. Some hints of her personality came from the other character from the original short story. (Remember, the person who became Wayne was riding into town on a kandra with a horse’s body. That kandra was female.) The personality I’d been developing there eventually jumped rails to become Ranette.

She’s not kandra any longer, and I shifted some pieces of who she was to make her a more complete person. If you didn’t catch the hint from Wax, she is indeed a lesbian, though it’s not much of a big deal for the book. I try to find places for LGBT characters in the novels. (There’s another one in The Way of Kings.) However, I back off from making much of an issue about it.

I guess I could be accused of not giving them full representation because of the fact that they usually have minor roles. The truth is that I’m worried I’d just do a poor job of it if I tried to write from their viewpoint; being gay is one of those things that tends to be very dominant in a person’s way of seeing the world. It seems that there are a lot of pitfalls that I could saunter right into. I’ve think learned, after a lot of work, how to write female characters who (hopefully) don’t feel wrong. However, I haven’t taken the dive in trying to figure out how to write a gay or lesbian character.

But that’s only one reason. There’s a deeper one for me. Ranette will likely get viewpoints in the series, when I do more Wax and Wayne books. However, the books aren’t about sexual identity, so I’ll probably steer clear of that topic. In a way, I think that making a big deal of it could be more harmful. One of the reasons I put LGBT characters in my books is because they are a part of our world, and deserve representation in fiction. It’s strange to think that in our world, LGBT people make up a significant minority of the population, yet in fiction (particularly fantasy fiction) they tend to either vanish completely or the story has to be all about who they are and their sexuality.

This strikes me as a bad way to do things. Just like not every book including women characters should be about feminism, not every book including LGBT characters should be about sexual orientation or gender identity issues. If they are, then that just highlights the supposition that they’re out of the ordinary—it draws attention to that idea, rather than simply letting them be characters with a larger role in the story. We don’t care about Lord Harms’s sexuality, or Mister Suit’s, or that of Miles. Why shine a big spotlight on Ranette’s? It just seems divisive to me.

Anyway, those are just a few of my thoughts on the topic. Perhaps they will change as I ponder on it more.

Annotation The Alloy of Law Chapter Thirteen

Here is the second batch of annotations for The Alloy of Law. As with all of the other annotations here on the site, each annotation contains spoilers for the current chapter. Spoilers for chapters after the current one are hidden by spoiler tags. We recommend you read the book before reading the annotations!

Train-Top Fight

Yes, I had a fight atop a moving train. DON’T JUDGE ME.

I couldn’t help myself, honestly. This fit perfectly with the narrative, and while I realize it’s a bit of a stereotypical place for a fight sequence, I really wanted to see it happen. So there you go.

This is a rather cinematic book—meaning I see it as translating easily to film. Unfortunately, I doubt that will ever happen. Not because I’m pessimistic about having films made in the first place (which I am), but because this is essentially book four in a series. Beyond that, it’s a very odd book four, one that departs wildly from the previous trilogy in setting and (in some cases) tone.

What that means is that we’ll probably never see a film. We couldn’t start with one just of Wax and Wayne, because the setting is too much of a mismatch. Magic, plus the wild west, plus urbanized early 1900s, but it’s not on our world and has three books worth of mythology to it? This sort of thing can work on paper, but I find it unlikely that studio executives would look at it and say, “Yeah, that sounds like a surefire hit to fund.”

Still, we can still hope for the original trilogy making it to film. Perhaps if they’re really sucessful, we could see something happen with these books.

The Book’s Title

It’s from this chapter that we get the title of the book. The Alloy of Law. I realize it’s an odd title. However, something about it strikes me. I don’t think everyone is going to like it; it’s certainly not as immediately powerful as something like The Way of Kings. But then, it’s also a little more unique. It does, in my mind, encapsulate the theme of the novel. The idea is that these two men—Wax and Miles—are both taking their own interpretations of what it means to follow the law, and mixing it up and making something new of it. This book is a confrontation between their two different ideals.

The working book title was simply Wax and Wayne. (As I was writing the early chapters, that was how they were titled.) I knew this title wouldn’t stick, however, as it’s a pretty lame pun. Now, I happen to be fond of lame puns. But they don’t belong in book titles unless you happen to be writing Xanth or Bob Asprin-type novels.

I can’t honestly remember which name—Wax or Wayne—I came up with first. I had Wayne as a character first, but he had a different name. Wax’s name came from the Mistborn ideal, where the characters frequently had strange fantasy names that abreviated to fun terms. (Like Hammond becoming Ham or Dockson becoming Dox.) Wax just fit well with those. Wayne, on the other hand, is a name that feels Western to me, for obvious reasons. As soon as I began thinking of the character by that name, he started to become complete to me—and so I had to keep it, even though the “Wax and Wayne” pun will probably make people groan.

Annotation The Alloy of Law Chapter Twelve

Here is the second batch of annotations for The Alloy of Law. As with all of the other annotations here on the site, each annotation contains spoilers for the current chapter. Spoilers for chapters after the current one are hidden by spoiler tags. We recommend you read the book before reading the annotations!

The group investigates the railroad tracks and canal

So, let’s talk about the realities of speed bubbles. I did research on this, and got different answers from people on what really should happen if you could slow time like this. One of the issues is that light doesn’t change speeds based on this sort of issue, so there was discussion of what things would look like inside looking out or outside looking in. It seems likely that there’d be some sort of red shift, and also that things might grow more dim inside a speed bubble. This is all really very theoretical, however, and so—in the end—I decided that there was enough disagreement among scientists with whom I spoke that it wouldn’t be glaringly irregular if I just had the shimmer at the borders and stayed away from dealing with speed of light issues.

There’s a much larger issue dealing with slowed time that rarely gets addressed by this type of fiction. I considered using it, and it’s this: conservation of energy. Inside the speed bubble, Wax and Wayne are moving far more quickly, and therefore have a ton of kinetic energy compared to those outside of it. And so, a coin tossed from inside the bubble going outside would suddenly move with a proportional increase in speed (proportiaonal to how much slower things were outside).

In essence, speed bubble = railgun.

This is dangerous for narrative reasons. I’ve often said that the limitations of a power are more interesting than the powers themselves. (It’s Sanderson’s Second Law of Magics: Limitations > Powers.) One of the reasons for removing Mistborn and Full Feruchemists from the setting was so that we could focus in on the usefulness of the individual powers in Allomancy and Feruchemy. That falls by the wayside if any of the individual powers become too strong on their own.

I didn’t want Wayne to be able to slow time, then sit inside his bubble and leisurely pick off enemies one at a time. And so, I had to place strong limitations on the speed bubbles. (Much stronger limitations than on other aspects of Allomancy. Pushing and Pulling, for example, have their limitations based in solid science. With speed bubbles, I eventually decided that solid science made them way too powerful. So I had to change things.) Therefore, the rules became: No shooting/throwing things out of speed bubbles, no moving speed bubbles, and a required couple second cool-down between creating different speed bubbles. The first rule broke required objects to be deflected when leaving the bubble and that we have the bubble absorb excess kinetic energy when something leaves it.

Disappointing for the scientists, I know, but it makes for a stronger story.

Annotation The Alloy of Law Chapter Eleven

Here is the second batch of annotations for The Alloy of Law. As with all of the other annotations here on the site, each annotation contains spoilers for the current chapter. Spoilers for chapters after the current one are hidden by spoiler tags. We recommend you read the book before reading the annotations!

First Miles Viewpoint

Dan, from my writing group, thinks that this Miles scene is misplaced, and thinks I should have held off from putting one in for a few more chapters. (He thinks the second one is better placed.) Dan usually has a good eye for these sorts of things, so I’ll admit I’m not a hundred percent sure that I like this scene being here.

However, that said, in the draft that Dan read, Wax wasn’t sure it was Miles until he saw the cigar box. Even then, there was a question. I decided, because of feedback, that wasn’t terribly realistic. Wax would have recognized the voice well enough from the start to begin suspecting Miles, so keeping that suspicion from the reader lacked authenticity. For that reason, in a later draft I revised so that Miles’ name is mentioned in the first chapter where Wax starts suspecting him.

Miles is the most erratic character in this book, personality-wise. He’s an interesting guy on several fronts, but I worry he’s got too much going on in that head of his to present a compelling bad guy. He’s got a lot of different motives, and he’s not certain about many of them. We will see how the reaction to him is; I acknowledge that he’s no Zane, however. That’s probably a good thing . . .

It may sound like I’m dissatisfied with Miles, but I’m not. I just happen to like what he does to Wax more than I think Miles himself is compelling as a villan. I’m pleased with his role in the book.

Marasi is an Allomancer

One of my big goals in these post-epic Mistborn books is to give a chance for more limited-power people (Mistings and their Feruchemical cousins, Ferrings) a chance to shine. In the previous trilogy, the focus really was on the Mistborn. Vin and Kelsier fit the epic fantasy mindset I wanted—powerful in an epic sort of way, broadly capable with abilities in a lot of areas.

For these books, I wanted to show people who had one or two powers, instead of sixteen, and show how specialization can achieve some incredible results. Because of that, I intentionally held back in the first trilogy in letting Vin do a few things. (Note how much better Zane was with minute steelpushes and ironpulls than she was.) Vin was incredibly skilled, but because she had so many powers to work with, she didn’t home in as much on any one of them. Things like Wax’s steel bubble are tricks I wanted to save for people like Wax. (He’s what we’d call in the Mistborn world a steel savant, so capable with his metal—and having burned it so long, for so many years—that he’s got an instinctive ability with it that lets him be very precice.)

And so we come to Marasi, who has the power opposite—but paired with—Wayne’s ability. Both she and Wayne have powers I wanted to delve into. Indeed, I kind of promised that the last metals would get highlighted in these newer books. Matching that, I’ve given Miles the same power the Lord Ruler used to heal himself from so many incredible wounds. I wanted to explore more of what this skill was capable of when not overshadowed by so many other powers and abilites.

The Alloy of Law ebook at $2.99!

Tor announced this week that the ebook for The Alloy of Law, the first book in the second Mistborn sequence, is on sale at $2.99 for the rest of the year. (At least in the US; other countries may see slightly different prices. I’ve heard people say it’s $4.99 on Kindle in some countries, and €2.99 on Google Play in others.)

I know there are many of you who love the first Mistborn trilogy who haven’t yet tried out the sequels. This sale is a great opportunity to check them out, if you’ve been waffling.

The Alloy of Law jumps forward more than 300 years after the events of the original trilogy. An industrial revolution is in full force, and knowledge of gunpowder is no longer suppressed. That means guns. Lots of guns. And magic too.

With Mistborn, from the start I’ve wanted a fantasy world that changed, that grew updated and modernized. I pitched Mistorn as a series of trilogies, which many of you probably already know. Each series was to cover a different era in the world (Scadrial), and each was to be about different characters—starting with an epic fantasy trilogy, expanding eventually into a space opera science fiction series. The magic would be the common thread here, rather than specific characters.

I hadn’t originally planned to do a Mistborn sequence set in the equivalent of the early 1900s, but as I was working on Stormlight, I realized that it was going to be a long time (perhaps ten years) between The Hero of Ages and my ability to get back to the Mistborn world to do the first of the next epic arc.

That’s when I took a step back and asked myself how I really wanted to approach all of this. What I decided upon was that I wanted a new Mistborn series that acted as a counterpoint to Stormlight. Something for Mistborn fans that pulled out some of the core concepts of the series (Allomantic action, heist stories) and mashed them with another genre—as opposed to epic fantasy—to produce something that would be faster-paced than Stormlight, and also tighter in focus.

The result of this conundrum was The Alloy of Law, a shorter story arc in the Mistborn world. I believe it gives you everything you love about Mistborn in a more self-contained package. I started out thinking of these books more as a “fun adventure” rather than a deep epic. I hope you’ll approach it with that mindset. In a way, I’m hoping books like these will balance the Stormlight Archive. Sometimes, you want a 1000-page book with hundreds of different characters. Sometimes, however, you want a quick, fun book with compelling lead characters, good action, and fun banter. That’s what this book is.

Though the story does gain more depth and and breadth in the sequels. The first one, Shadows of Self, was just released last month and The Bands of Mourning, the third book in the second era, comes out in January. So if you check out The Alloy of Law and like what you see, you don’t have to wait to get more of the story!

A few years ago, some fans put together a trailer for The Alloy of Law, which although not strictly accurate is still pretty awesome. (By the way, only the prologues of the first two Wax & Wayne books take place in an Old West-type setting; the main plots take place in the big city.)

Goodreads Choice Awards Voting Ends Tonight + Updates

First off, thanks to everyone who has taken the time to vote for the Goodreads Choice Awards already. The final round ends tonight. Firefight is nominated in the Young Adult Fantasy & Science Fiction category, and Shadows of Self is nominated in the Fantasy category. Best of luck to all the nominees!

In this week’s episode of Writing Excuses, Q & A on Revision, we continue to answer questions from from the WXR attendees, who were aboard the Independence of the Seas with us.

During revision, when do you think it’s acceptable to throw the whole thing out?
How do you fit the whole structure in your head?
What do you find you most often need to add?
What do you do when your revisions have made things worse?
How do you avoid over-writing during the revision process?
When revising, how many passes do you make, and what order are they in?
Do you take the sounds of words into account when writing and revising?

Last week, in Tor.com’s continuing reread posts for Words of Radiance, Shallan practiced her scholarship and her Lightweaving, and perhaps took a small step toward confronting her memories. This week, in Chapter 61, we go back in time to watch sixteen-year-old Shallan struggle with the balance between helping her father and helping, well, everyone else.

My assistant Adam is working on updating the Twitter post archive for November.

Goodreads Choice Awards First Round + Updates

In this year’s Goodreads Choice Awards, Shadows of Self is nominated in the Fantasy category and Firefight is in the YA Fantasy & SF category. The first round of voting wraps up this weekend. Congratulations to all of the nominees!

And for those of you who didn’t see the post on my Twitter and Facebook the other day, I recently participated in a podcast while on tour for Shadows of Self at The Tattered Cover in Denver. Give it a listen here.

Some exciting news coming out of New York City today; Steelheart has been placed on the ninth-grade list for the NYC Department of Educations: NYC Reads 365, aimed at supporting independent reading all year long. As many of you know, I was fourteen years old when a teacher reached out to me and suggested Barbara Hambly’s Dragonsbane, a book which changed my life and set me on the course I am still traversing today. So I am honored for one of my books to be part of such a great program.

In this week’s episode of Writing Excuses, How Do I Fix What is Broken?, we start this months discussion on “Revision” as we continue the Writing Excuses Season 10 Master Class. While many of you may be tempted by NaNoWriMo, there’s a different kind of work to be done! Delia Sherman joins us again, this time for a frank talk about the tools and techniques we use during our revisions.

Last week, in Tor.com’s continuing reread posts for Words of Radiance, Szeth sat on top of Urithiru, feeling sorry for himself and working himself up to go find better answers. This week, in Interlude 11, Eshonai reveals more of the difference in her character after her transformation to Stormform; as expected, this is not a cheerful event.

My assistant Adam is working on updating the Twitter post archive for October.

The Wheel of Time Companion and Mystic

Hey, all. I’m back from tour at long last, and am hard at work on Stormlight 3. In fact, because it’s national novel writing month, you might see me posting daily wordcounts on social media. Back in 2002, I finished the original draft of The Way of Kings over NaNoWriMo. (Finished it the Friday after Thanksgiving, I believe.) Seems thematically appropriate to me to post about it again, now that it’s November.

This book won’t be ready until next year around this time, at the earliest. Fortunately, I can point you toward a few new releases that might keep you busy for a little while. The first is The Wheel of Time Companion. This is the official name and release for the encyclopedia that Harriet and Team Jordan have been working on for many years. (I believe they started compiling it way back even before the release of Knife of Dreams!)

They’ve put a ton of effort into this volume, and it shows. If you’ve ever wanted a comprehensive encyclopedia of the people, places, and terminology of the Wheel of Time, this is for you! And it will look very handsome on the shelf beside your other Wheel of Time books.

The second release is tangentially Wheel of Time-related as well. Jason Denzel, webmaster for the largest Wheel of Time fansite, has become a good friend of mine over the years. He was the first person in Wheel of Time fandom to really reach out to me when I was announced as the guy who would finish the series. (He actually found me on tour with a backpack full of Magic cards.) He was an awesome resource all through my working on the books, and we’ve remained buddies ever since.

It happens that Jason is also a storyteller. He’s done mostly independent films up to this point, but a few years back he wrote a novel called Mystic that he let me read. It’s very good—a kind of Celtic-inspired fantasy with some very intriguing worldbuilding. It’s one of those books that straddles the line between young adult and adult (much like the early volumes of the Wheel of Time, actually) and is a quick, well-paced read. Give it a look!

Meanwhile, I’ll get back to work.

Shadows of Self tour ends + Updates

My tour for Shadows of Self wrapped up yesterday, and it was awesome to see so many of you! I will be posting some of the highlights from my tour over the next few weeks.

If you were unable to come to one of my tour stops, it’s okay—the greatest compliment you can give me is to read my books. I still have YALLFest in Charleston coming up in November, and I’ll be adding some Utah and Idaho signings around holidays in November and December. As always, if you’d like email reminders when I’m going to be near your city, tell me your metro area here.

In this week’s episode of Writing Excuses, Q & A on Endings, Delia Sherman joined us aboard the Independence of the Seas to answer the following questions from the attendees at the Writing Excuses Workshop:

Why do more short stories than novels end on tragic notes?
How do you keep an ending from being predictable or boring?
How do you write a stand-alone ending with sequel potential?
What are the best ways to avoid infodump endings?
Are there differences between writing the first novel in a series and other novels in the series?
How do you know which questions to leave unanswered?
What sort of attention do you give to your last lines?

Last week, in Tor.com’s continuing reread posts for Words of Radiance, Lift and Wyndle led us into discussions of Edgedancers, the Cognitive Realm, murder, and justice. This week, in Interlude 10, we join Szeth atop the highest tower in the world to contemplate the End of All Things—or the end of all his former assumptions, anyway.

My assistant Adam is working on updating the Twitter post archive for September and October.

UK tour continues + Updates

My tour for the release of Shadows of Self continues this week in the UK. As always, if you would like me to send you an email when I’ll be appearing near you, tell me your metro area here.

Tuesday, Oct 20: Sheffield & Newcastle
Wednesday, Oct 21: Edinburgh
Thursday, Oct 22: Leeds & Nottingham
Friday–Sunday, Oct 23–25: FantasyCon in Nottingham

Details on my events page.

It’s been a busy few weeks and we haven’t kept you up to date on the new Writing Excuses episodes. Here are last few, in case you missed them:

What’s the Difference Between Ending and Stopping? Nalo Hopkinson joins us for this episode, which we recorded before a live audience of Out of Excuses Workshop & Retreat attendees. October’s master class episodes focus on endings, and in this first installment we talk about what an ending really is. It’s obviously the last part of the book, but the gestalt of “ending” is so much more than just “The End,” and it’s important that we understand all that before committing ourselves to being done writing it.
Your Character’s Moral Pendulum: Brad Beaulieu and Jaym Gates join us from the GenCon Indy Writing Symposium to talk about good versus evil, and how your character might swing between the two. And it’s all about that swing. Moral grey areas are more interesting if we move through them. We talk about how we swing the pendulum, what difficulties we encounter, and what sorts of things we want to have happen to our reader when it moves.
How In The World Do I Tie All This Together? We are joined again by Nalo Hopkinson, at sea, for our second Master Class installment on endings. We cover some of the reasons why an ending might not be working, and then talk about the sorts of diagnoses that will help you solve the problem. You’ll likely need to dig deep in your toolbox. Our episodes covering the MICE quotient, promises made to the readers, and the Hollywood formula may be worth reviewing in this process.

Last week, in Tor.com’s continuing reread posts for Words of Radiance, everyone threw temper tantrums and Kaladin landed in prison. This week, in Interlude 9, we jaunt across the continent to Azir’s capital, where we’ll meet with an unexpected style of proto-Radiant.