>> Brian Hill: My name is Brian Hill, and it is my pleasure to welcome our guest and welcome
all of you. I -- I am a developer in the office addition so this is not my normal thing of
organizing these events. I got an email from somebody at Tor last week saying can you host
this author in March? And I had to say I'm sorry no. But for Brandon I'm happen to -- to go to
the extra trouble.
I would like to thank a few people I would like to thank Amy Draves and the Microsoft
Research Visiting Speakers Series for providing this venue. They are filming this for
broadcast into the overflow room if you are having trouble finding a seat and also if people are
tuning in from around the company.
If you would like to learn more about the visiting speaker series, and come to see other
authors and dignitaries, please join one of the speaker aliases, speaker two, speaker three,
four, five and six, and they wrote that up on the -- on the board, and then you'll get
notifications of other events.
I'd also like to thank Tor. Tor has sent us some goodies that we'll be raffling off at the end.
We've got some backpacks and some paperbacks of The Way of Kings.
>> Brandon Sanderson: Yeah, so those of you watching, run on down here. You might be
able to win something.
>> Brian Hill: You heard him. We also have some more bookmarks, we've got arithmetic
bookmarks with young readers. Brandon will talk a little bit more about his upcoming books
when I let him speak.
>>: [laughter]
>> Brian Hill: Also, I would like to thank Dwayne and the university bookstore. They have
been long-time supporters of Brandon Sanderson and they make it possible each year for
Brandon to come to Seattle which makes it possible for him to come and join us. I've known
Brandon for five or six years and I met him during one of the Mistborn book tours and this is a
second time that he's come to Microsoft, grateful to him for doing that.
He brought with him a special guest which many of you recognize, the wife of Robert Jordan,
Harriet McDougal, will be speaking a little bit as well. She has a long career in editing. She
was is editor for all of the Wheel of Time books as well as other books that you may have
read. So since you really have come to hear them, I will turn the time over to Brandon and
Harriet.
>> Brandon Sanderson: Thank you.
>>: [applause]
>> Brandon Sanderson: So, way back in 1990, I wandered into my local bookstore. It's call
Cosmic Comics. It's a little tiny shop. I actually usually rode my bike there even though I was
I was approaching 16, I couldn't legally drive, so I'll just say I rode my bike there. And every
week I would go in, and I would see what new books were on the shelf.
To the right of me, right as I'd walk in, they had this little shelf they sold science fiction and
fantasy books and comic books -- I wasn't as interested in the comics books. I was there for
the fantasy novels -- and they had this thing where you'd buy ten and get one free, which had
me sold, right, free book. I would always -- I would always plan and would buy ten cheap
books and then find the really expensive thick one which was like a dollar more and get that
one free. I thought I'm the son of an accountant so I thought I was getting away with
something. And there on the shelf was a big book. Big book.
Now I always say length of the book doesn't actually indicate its quality, but I had learned very
on, early on as a fantasy reader, that you wanted the big books, because if you liked the
book, you had that much more to love. If you got a short book and you fell in love with it, it
was over before you knew it, and if you got a big book, you would say, well, by the time you
fell in love with it you had this big book to read. And there was a big book.
I'm not your -- your typical writer. I guess there are no typical writers. But a lot of writers I
know you'd ask them when they first started -- started writing, they're like oh yeah, I was six
months old, started my first story. It was a war epic.
>>: [laughter]
>> Brandon Sanderson: And you -- you talk to writers and they you know all this stuff. I was
what we call a reluctant reader. That's a literacy person term I didn't know back then. All I
know is I didn't like books. All through the latter part of my grade school days and my first two
years of middle school, seventh and eighth grade, I did not like books.
In fact, I was convinced that books were boring, and people kept trying to get me to reed
books and they would give me these books and every one of these books would have like
this, like, boy who goes off and lives in the forest, and he has like this pet dog and his dog
dies, and everyone's sad. And I read like three of these and I'm like books are dumb, why is
there -- I don't like dogs. I'm a cat person. So I'm actually happy when the dogs died. But -I'm just joking, dogs are wonderful. My cats -- my mom likes dog person so. But no, I just
thought books were not for me.
Last part of my eighth grade year, I had a teacher, her name was Ms. Reeder, by coincidence.
She was my English teacher, and she insisted that I read a book on her shelf. This is
because I'd gotten really good at faking my way through book reports, and I was a clever little
boy that realized you could find out what was in a book without reading it, and then write a
very convincing book report.
And my teacher made me pick a book that she had read recently. There's a little stack of
them, you know, like in these schools they have these racks of ratty paperbacks that like a
hundred students have read, like yesterday's spaghetti is stained on one. But you know every
teacher has these things, and I had to pick one of these books and so -- she wouldn't let me
get away with this time.
I -- dragging my feet went to the back of the classroom and browsed flu these ratty books and
came across this book with a dragon on the cover. Now, I had not tried a fantasy book since
Lord of the Rings, which, if you give Lord of the Rings to a boy who's not really that good at
reading despite it being a brilliant novel, all it does is convince you that Lord of the Rings is a
lot like Isaiah, right? You're like oh, I'm sure this is wonderful, but I'll let someone else tell me
why.
And I had not finished Lord of the Rings. And so -- but I saw this and there was this -- this
dragon and it also had a very attractive young woman on the cover, which I will admit helped
quite a bit also. So Michael Whelan painting he's a fantastic illustrator, it was Dragonsbane
by Barbara Hambly, if any of you have read this. I highly recommend, it's a wonderful book.
I picked this up even though it was a bit thicker than I perhaps had wanted, you know. I did
the normal middle schooler thing looking for the shortest ones first. And I took this book home
and read it, and it changed my life. This sounds stupid when I say it, I realize, it's a -- it's a
dopey little fantasy novel, right? But it changed my life.
There was something in there. The imagination, the realism of the characters mixed with this
wonderful scenario. Dragonsbane is about a middle-aged woman who tries to convince her
husband not to go slay a dragon. He did it when he was young and now there's another
dragon but now they're middle-aged and you know they're probably like in their early 40s but
to me they were like ancient when I was reading this. And like, why should a 14-year-old boy
connect, right, with this book about a middle-aged woman having a midlife crisis, which is
what the book's about, but I loved it, it was amazing.
And I ran back to my teacher and I said people write books about dragons? This is
wonderful. She's like yeah there's lots of them. There's this thing called the card catalog, you
should go investigate this. And so I did. Now these for for the younger people in the
audience, card catalogs were these things --
>>: [laughter]
>> Brian Sanderson: -- that -- they were sometimes stone, actually --
>>: [laughter]
>> Brian Sanderson: -- and you had to lug them open and inside in caveman script it would
write the authors alphabetically and the titles alphabetically, which, we had two of them at my
school. So I went to the title card catalog and said well, Dragonsbane was good. What's the
next card after it? It was a book called Dragonflight by Anne McCaffrey. And I'm like well, this
one has a dragon on the cover, and that looks like an attractive young woman also, so I will
read that book. Lo and behold, Dragonflight is one of the best fantasy books I've ever read.
Hugo award winning novel by one of the best -- the greatest names in the genre, also with
this wonderful Michael Whelan cover, and so I read through everything they had of that. And
the next one in line actually was Dragon Prince by Melanie Rawn. Also with an attractive
young woman on the cover by coincidence, I'm sure.
And I became a fantasy addict. I read every fantasy book I could get my hands on. And it's
kind of a funny story that summer someone gave me a David Eddings novel with some of you
may have read I actually was skeptical because I'm like, I don't know if a guy can write
fantasy.
>>: [laughter]
>> Brandon Sanderson: Because I was reading Barbara Hambly and Anne McCaffrey at that
point, and -- but I gave David Eddings a chance, and -- and David Eddings further got
fantasy's hooks in me. And so by that fall, I was super fantasy addict man. I was reading
everything I could get my hands on and was absolutely loving it.
And it I think it was -- actually I've been telling this story wrong, because I think it was actually
the following spring that Wheel of Time came out, because I think I would have been 14 there,
turned 15 -- but whenever it was I got Eye of the World, I remember when it came out in
paperback.
And I picked this book up, and it was a big book -- and I had been searching for something.
My friends had given me David Eddings. One of my Ray Feist fan, and everyone had their
series that they followed that they were in love with, and everything I'd read, Thomas
Covenant and Dragonriders and all these things were serious and were already established
that people had suggested to me, and I had not yet found my series to suggest to people.
And I was kind of searching for it, right? You know how that it. You know like fantasy had
become my thing, like I want to be a fantasy hipster but I'm not because everybody's giving
me the books. Hipster's didn't exist back then, but because that was the mindset. And I
found this book and I was like I'm going to give this one a try, and it was amazing.
I loved this book Eye of the World, and I remember distinctly getting done with it and thinking
aha, I've found it. I've -- I am going to be on the ground floor for this one. And then when this
trilogy is done --
>>: [laughter]
>> Brandon Sanderson: -- I'm going to be the one giving it to people and talking about how
you should read this. But I remember when The Great Hunt came out and my little bookstore
did not get the hardcovers or trade paperbacks very often. But The Great Hunt came out in
trade paperback. And I said aha, other people are figuring it out. Now the book is being
released in trade paperback, it must be getting popular. And then The Dragon Reborn came
out in hardcover and I -- I thought, I knew it, this is the series. It's taking off, and I was there
first.
How many of you guys read the books in 1990, start -- anyone here? That's a surprising
number. Man. It's been a long road, hasn't it? You know, being a Wheel of Time fan is a
really interesting experience, so I don't know if any of you guys felt but it seems like everyone
I talk to has like at least one period of extreme rage towards Robert Jordan.
>>: [laughter]
>> Brandon Sanderson: It's weird isn't it? We love the series, we love him, and yet I -- this is
honest truth, my friend Micah and I, my roommate, he actually took my jacket photos, you can
go look it's -- Captain Demoux named after him, Micah DeMoux for years in the late 90s early
2000s, any time someone said Robert Jordan's name we -- I don't know if I told you this -- we
both raised our fists in the air and said damn him!
>>: [laughter]
>> Brandon Sanderson: In unison. He still does it. I can't do it anymore. I'm not -- but yeah,
we did it in unison. It was like a thing for us because, you know, it's like this series is never
ending. We love it, yes. At the same time it's been -- ups and downs over the years, and the
Wheel of Time has followed me through my career.
It's a really interesting thing, when I got to college I decided I waned to be a writer, and I
started reading the books that I loved as a youth and studying them and trying to figure out
how to do writing, because I love my professors, but writing teachers don't actually teach you
how to write. I don't know any of you have taken the writing classes, but they're like well, let's
explore your inner voice. And I'm like you're telling me I got to hear voices? Well, I already
do but they're not telling me how to write. How do I write? How do I make a character cool?
And teachers not really big on teaching you how to make characters cool. They like to teach
you how to develop your style.
And -- and so I started reading books, and I was actually very very disappointed because
some of authors that I read -- I don't want to mention names, but some of authors I read as a
youth did not hold up when I was an adult. And they -- they were perfect for me at the age but
as I tried to inspect them as an adult writer trying to develop my style, I didn't find the depth
that I wanted to dig into that I thought would make that -- would teach me how to write.
Robert Jordan still did. In fact, Robert Jordan was the one that I would dig into and find how
much I'd missed. I constantly tell a story about as a 15-year-old reading these books, you
know, there's this character Moiraine who's just like always keeping the boys down and not
letting them, she's always giving them orders and I was always like Moiraine, just leave them
alone they need to go off and do cool things! And then I read the books as an adult and well
I'm studying them and I'm like, you stupid kids ,listen to Moiraine!
>>: [laughter]
>> Brandon Sanderson: Right? There's this depth to Wheel of Time books that the various
characters are all expressed on very different levels. And Moiraine has an entire story going
on behind the scenes that you don't see because you don't see it through her viewpoints and
there's a little subtlety and detail. I mean maybe I'm dense, but I didn't get the whole thing
with it being our world, and there -- and -- who was it? Not Buzz Aldrin --
>> Harriet McDougal: John Glenn.
>> Brandon Sanderson: -- John Glenn being in the book referenced and America and
Russia and the Cold War being referenced in legend, I didn't get that stuff till I was in college
and I'm like how did it miss that? You know it's like a smack to the face right the first time you
read -- realize that that Gawain -- Gawain Alvier [phonetic] which is Guinevere, and, you
know, I didn't get this as a kid, and building these things out and understanding them and
seeing the depth of writing that he was capable of the really wonderful sentences that evoke
so much feeling emotion and description.
I started studying the Wheel of Time to learn how to write it became my -- my primary model
just on a prose level of how to do this thing that no one can teach me how to do.
I spent the next -- I decided I wanted to be a writer -- actually I was serving mission for the
Elias [phonetic] church in Korea. The reason is I -- I really wanted to be a writer before then,
but my mother convinced me that writers don't get scholarships and that I should be a doctor
instead.
And so I actually applied to BYU. I grew up in Nebraska to go -- go be a chemistry major
because that got scholarships, and then I got into college and realized what they do to all
those people who just said they want to be chemistry majors to get a scholarship is they put
them in a room with really hard chemistry class that other people don't have to take their
freshman year to show you what chemistry is like.
And I then went to Korea and was so happy to be on a different continent from the chemistry.
I did not enjoy that -- that freshman year, but I did spend a lot of that time writing. And I
decided I missed writing so much, but I didn't miss chemistry, that I had made the wrong
choice, and I decided to start writing a book on my days off during, during my missionary
work, and I just started writing in a notebook. And I completely fell in love with the process.
I'd known since a kid this is what I wanted to do, but that's the fist time that it clicked for me
that what I loved to do should be my job, right? That I could spend eight hours working on a
story and come out of it feeling awesome and have not and not miss that time at all. I get the
same thing from a lot of my friends who are code monkeys. It kind of scratches the same
itch. They get into it and you're creating something, and it's working, and it's clicking, and
yes, it can be hard but you love it at the same time. That's what I wanted to do.
Over the course of the next eight years I wrote 13 novels, trying to break in. And I eventually
sold a Elantris, my sixth book. And I sold it to Tor books. And when I got an offer from Tor -- it
was funny, I called up my agent. He said, well, I want to take this and I want to shop it,
because usually you can get a better offer if you have one offer from somebody. This is basic
business philosophies, right? And you go to everyone else and says, well, we got this offer
from this company, will you beat it? And I said no, you can't do that. And he's like, but we can
get more money. And I said, Tor is Robert Jordan's publisher.
>>: [laughter]
>> Brandon Sanderson: We're not going anywhere else. When you have an offer from the
top you just take it, and I did. And he, to this -- not to this day, because things have kind of
changed in my career, but there are many years when he would say to me, you know I still
wish you'd let me taken that. I bet we could have, you know, got it bigger launch
yada-yada-yada and when I didn't want start working on the Wheel of Tame I actually called
him and I said so do you still wish and he's like ah, you know, ah.
>> Harriet McDougal: [laughter]
>> Brandon Sanderson: But in 2007, Robert Jordan passed away. And I had never met him.
I had been able to see him once at a convention. But I had never met him all this time I
viewed him as a mentor. But I -- I didn't know him. We had sent him my first book. He got all
sorts of arcs, though. Harriet later found it. Everyone sends their book to Robert Jordan,
right? And you know, when you -- you get your first book, I just send him a book because,
you know, of course you're going to send your idol a book. But I never expected him to read
it, and it was perfectly outright. But we -- we sent him a book, we did dig it out later.
And I was terrified for what would happen to the series, as everyone was. But I trusted Tor. I
trusted Robert Jordan, and I assumed that the series was in good hands even though I had
read many interviews where he said if he passed away the series would not be finished, and
that he would have his notes bulldozed, and in 2007 about a month or so maybe -- maybe
less than that after he passed away, I got a phone call. And I'm actually going to let Harriet
tell her story now of where that all came from.
>> Harriet McDougal: The week of -- after my husband's funeral, a friend was staying with
me. She'd come down for the service and she as so many people are as both a fan of
fantasy and heavily into the net, and she put a printout in front of me the basic sort of semi
[indiscernible] and said you need to read this. And it was the eulogy that Brandon had written
and posted on his website. And I read it and thought, gosh, that's just beautiful. And it's also
the feeling for my husband's work that I would love to see in whoever takes over to finish the
series, because in his last weeks and months my husband had made it very clear to me that
he did want the series finished.
I draw distinction -- he had a horror of sharecropping the endless work of other writers in a
world that someone has created, he really had a horror of that. So that's not going to happen.
But he really did want the series finished.
He began one Saturday night, his cousin -- a cousin named Wilson Grooms, who was as
close to him as a brother, was visiting, and I had a friend there, thank God, who once been a
court reporter. And I was scrabbling round in the kitchen making food or something and Jim -who has read the book? Who's not read the book?
>> Brandon Sanderson: The last one? Who hasn't finished the last one?
>> Harriet McDougal: Well, okay. It was --
>> Brandon Sanderson: No spoilers.
>> Harriet McDougal: My husband called him Jim began to talk and he said, there's a blank
in the blank that nobody knows about, not even Harriet. And he was off and running. And the
court reporter was there, fortunately, because I was trying to take notes and instead I was just
staring at him in rapture kind of, and Wilson went out at midnight and brought a tape recorder,
and that was the start of a real outpouring of what he wanted in the rest of the series. That's
how I knew he wanted it finished. Otherwise, he'd have kept his mouth shut. Which was not
very much in his nature.
>>: [laughter]
>> Harriet McDougal: So anyway, I read this wonderful eulogy and thought yeah, and I called
-- I worked with Tom Doherty the publisher of Tor for 40 years, in fact was the original editorial
director of Tor. And I called him and said, yo, Tom, tell me about Sanderson. And he's a
publisher, so he said, well, his numbers and all that.
>>: [laughter]
>> Harriet McDougal: I'm an editor. I don't want numbers. He said, I'll send you Mistborn,
Elantris is his first novel. And, as I'm sure you know, in the industry, we think of first novels as
-- that's the bike with training wheels. And if you really want to see what a writer can do, look
at the second. So, I began reading it, and I got to page 47, and I fell asleep, which was not
his fault.
>>: [laughter]
>> Harriet McDougal: I've got to tell you, if the story that I'm reading is in trouble, I cannot go
to sleep until I've either figured out how to fix it or thrown it across the room and said so much
for that one. It's a peculiarity of the editorial personality.
So I woke up, and his world was clear, his characters were clear, even what they ate, and the
conflict, I said, yeah. This guy can do it. He really can. I can feel it. And see it. So I called
Tom and told him what I thought and he said, Harriet -- because he knows me 40 years -- he
said, have you read the whole book? And I said no.
>>: [laughter]
>> Harriet McDougal: And he said don't you think you should? This is a very important
decision. And I said, it would be a very important decision if I were hiring Brandon to write a
Sanderson novel, but I'm not. I'm hiring him to write a Robert Jordan novel, and he can do it.
And unspoken was: because I'll make him.
>>: [laughter]
>> Harriet McDougal: So anyway, that was the beginning, and I really was quite sure, but I do
have remnants of common sense, and I called the British publisher and said do you have any
suggestions? And I called an editor in New York whose opinion I trust and said do you have
any suggestions, and anybody better out there? And went on for a number of weeks while I
stewed on this decision a bit.
And -- and then I called Brandon Sanderson. And I didn't do the professional thing and say,
hey, Tor, give me his number. The -- Provo, Utah, that's got to be...that big. I called
information and I got a woman who answered the phone. I said, is this Brandon Sanderson's
house? She said yes, it is. And I said well, I'm here to -- my name's Harriet McDougal, and
I'm the widow of Robert Jordan, and I'd like to talk to him about finishing the series that my
husband wrote. And she said I have no idea what you're talking about.
>>: [laughter]
>> Harriet McDougal: It was the other Brandon Sanderson.
>>: [laughter]
>> Brandon Sanderson: He's a wrestler.
>>: [laughter]
>> Brandon Sanderson: That's all I know about him. We got Google mixed -- he mixed us up
-- I -- Bing mixed us up.
>>: [laughter]
>> Harriet McDougal: So anyway, then I called New York got the right number and called
Brandon.
>> Brandon Sanderson: And so I got up in the morning, I -- I keep an artist's schedule.
That's a nice way of saying that a sleep in till noon. I work in from about -- I do a lot of my
writing from about ten until four a.m., and then I sleep until about noon and I get up and then
I -- I work from about noon until five doing mostly during that time email and things like that.
But anyway so I get up and every day when I get up the first that I think is do is I check my
voicemail. I used to. Now -- now, I let people call my assistant. Voicemail annoys me. I'll
answer it if it's Harriet.
>> Harriet McDougal: [laughter]
>> Brandon Sanderson: But I listen to my voicemail and there was a voicemail said hello
Brandon this is Harriet McDougal. I would like for you to call me back. There is something I'd
like to talk to you about. She said -- well, Robert Jordan's widow, but I already -- already
knew who Harriet McDougal was. And so I just got this voicemail, I'm like, what -- what?
Now, you got to remember, it's not like I applied for this or anything. I did not. And it's not like
I had any clue. I honestly assumed that it was taken care of, and was just a fan wanting to
read what came out just like everyone else. And so I called Harriet back and she didn't
answer. She was out having a massage.
>> Harriet McDougal: Yeah.
>>: [laughter]
>> Brandon Sanderson: So I called my editor and he didn't answer, but he never answers, so
it's okay. Then I call my agent who always answers and he didn't answer. And so I wandered
upstairs to my wife and I -- this is one of those distinct memories that kind of burn in your
brain, and I walked into the bedroom and she was folding clothes or something and I said
Robert Jordan's widow just called me, and my wife was like what?
Because when we got married she made -- we exchanged books. She had to read the Wheel
of Time, and I had to read Robert McKinley -- Robert McKinley's book's like that. And -- but
she was well versed in Wheel of Time. She'd actually read Eye of the World before we got
married, so that -- that was a point in her favor early on in the dating process. She hadn't
read the whole series but she has done now. And -- she said so, what, what did, what did
Robert Jordan's widow want? And I said I don't know. I can't get a hold of her.
>> Harriet McDougal: [laughter]
>> Brandon Sanderson: And so my wife she -- she said she's never seen me that nervous,
and she really hasn't. I'm not a nervous type. I'm one of these, I'm very comfortable with lots
of different situations. I'm just kind of a go-with-the-flow sort of guy. If you get my wife up
here she says that -- that on that day, I was more nervous than -- than on my wedding day.
She says that jealously.
>>: [laughter]
>> Brandon Sanderson: But I had months to get ready for the wedding. This was out of
nowhere, right? It just came out of nowhere. And I finally got smart and I called up Tor. And I
got a hold of Patrick Nielson Hayden who is one of the editors there and I said, Patrick,
Robert Jordan's widow just called me. And Patrick said -- I remember this distinctly too -- oh
yeah. That's probably what you think it is.
>>: [laughter]
>> Brandon Sanderson: I'll have her call you back. And I'm like what do I think it is, Patrick?
He wouldn't say a word. He would not say a word. He knew Harriet very well and knew that
-- that he did not want to be breaking any news, and so. Harriet called me back and she said,
well, I was just wondering if you would be interesting -- we're compiling a short list.
>> Harriet McDougal: Yes, a short list.
>>: [laughter]
>> Harriet McDougal: That's not what I said. We're compiling a short list.
>> Brandon Sanderson: A short list of people we're considering, and I'm wondering if you
would be interested in finishing the Wheel of Time. And I said [growling sound].
>>: [laughter]
>> Brandon Sanderson: And I always say this and everyone laughs but really, it's true I don't
know if Harriet remembers it, but I could not speak. I had to write her an email the next day in
which I said I promise I can form coherent sentences.
>> Harriet McDougal: [laughter]
>> Brandon Sanderson: I was completely unable to reply to her. I did get out a yes. But -but that was about it. I was just stuttering and things. And then that night, it hit me. That
night I couldn't sleep, as one might imagine, and I came to the realization -- a couple of
realizations, the first one being holy cow, if I screw this up.
>>: [laughter]
>> Brandon Sanderson: It's going to be the worst disaster of my life. Well, personally,
because I love these books, and because I know there's like ten million fans who will all find
out where I live and --
>> Harriet McDougal: And they'll write things that begin Sanderson [indiscernible].
>> Brandon Sanderson: Yes. And I thought if I -- if I screw this up and it -- it kind of went
further than that with me thinking, how can I not screw this up? Because the only person who
could write this the right way is Robert Jordan and anyone who tries to write the book is going
to screw it up to an extent because it won't be one hundred percent his vision, the way it was
supposed to be.
And I still believe that. I think we got really close. I think we made fantastic books. I think we
did a wonderful job. I'm very proud of my proud, but at the same time I acknowledge it's not
quite what he would have done. There's no way for me to do whatever he would have done.
And so I debated calling and saying no, because I thought nobody can do this. It is
impossible to do this work. And something stopped me. Kind of the -- the third realization of
the night which was: What would happen if I said no? And they went and they hired
somebody who didn't love the series? What would happen?
And there are a lot of writers out there who are better than I am. I will be up front with that. I
know many a writer who are much better writers than I, but none of them had read the Wheel
of Time. Maya Angelou hasn't read the Wheel of Time, you know. And -- what would happen
if -- if one of them took over the Wheel of Time and then wrote it beautifully but didn't get the
characters right? And didn't do the book the right way? It would be my fault. Because I said
no, and I could have, I could have done it.
And I came to the realization that if Robert Jordan couldn't write the books, as a writer myself,
yes I wanted to do it, because I really felt that I would screw it up the least. I felt -- maybe
some of you have felt something like that, like I'm going to do it myself. And I had these
moments of yes I will do this, and I will do this myself, and I will make sure that everyone
who's out there like me, terrified of what's going to happen, that they get the book and it's the
right book, that it's -- that it's still the Wheel of Time.
And so, that's when I wrote that email to Harriet the next day and I said yes, I want to do this.
And I was very straightforward that time. No hemming and hawing, this time I really want to
do this. I think I can do it not as well as Robert Jordan, but better than anyone else out there.
Because if you take Wheel of Time fandom -- and there are bigger Wheel of Time fans than
me, but if you Wheel of Time fandom and you take pretty good fantasy writers and you make
a Venn diagram, I'm right there in the middle.
And so I said yes. And then Harriet said well, I need a little more time to consider, which is
justified. And I went on book tour, completely nervous for an entire month, not able to tell
people that I was been offered the chance to work on the Wheel of Time maybe.
After this nerve-wracking book tour, which -- yeah one of those tours -- very early in my
career, that was one of those tours where I would go to bookstores and sometimes nobody
would be there and they would not have ordered any books and they were like, who are you
again? And things like this. I got back, and Harriet called me and said yes, I would like you to
do this.
In a few weeks, we had all contract negotiations done. Contract negotiations went like this.
My agent -- who I do love by the way, even though I make -- his job is to offer me the
business side, right? Because I'm an artist. My manager said, we'll do some negotiations
and this is our bargaining ground and I was like this, no, no. We just say yes.
>>: [laughter]
>> Brandon Sanderson: And he's like, well we could try to push for this, and I'm like no, no,
no. We say yes. And so he had to call back right after the offer and says we say yes.
>>: [laughter]
>> Brandon Sanderson: The shortest negotiation of my entire life. I had contracts in hand
like lightning speed. Like when we got the offer on my first book, offer came in April. We had
contracts in November. Offer on this came on Monday, and I think we had contracts on
Thursday or something like that. And within a week, I was flying to Charleston.
And I -- I tell this story a lot but it's a fun story. I flew in. Harriet herself picked me up at the
airport. I'd been really nervous to meet Harriet, like you know really nervous. I knew Harriet
like she was one of the big editors in the field and authors have this kind of -- even, you know,
published authors are sometimes kind of scared of editors, right? And Harriet I didn't know if
you guys know, she edited Ender's Game, okay? She edited -- and discovered Robert Jordan
and she's -- she's behind the two biggest books in fantasy and science fiction of the last 30
years, Ender's Game and Eye of the World. So I was really nervous.
And so I'm like -- and then I meet her, and as you can tell, she's like this wonderful, just so
nice, awesome person. It was -- it was such a relief. I actually called Emily that night and I'm
like, I -- I didn't need to be worried. Like, take your favorite grandmother and mix her with a
southern gentlewoman and you have Harriet.
>>: [laughter]
>> Harriet McDougal: I've hidden the whips.
>>: [laughter]
>> Brandon Sanderson: And I she drove me to the house there at Charleston, which is this
wonderful house built in the 1700s, right?
>> Harriet McDougal: Barely. 1798.
>> Brandon Sanderson: And we walk in the door and Harriet had been cooking dinner and it
was a bean soup. I still remember all these things where she said well, I put some soup on,
and I can warm it up and would you like to have some food? And I said I would like the
ending, please.
>>: [laughter] [applause]
>> Brandon Sanderson: Because I didn't know, you know, I just signed the contracts without
knowing, you know, you guys work for Microsoft, NDA stuff, you got to say yes first and then
you get the NDA and then you get to be a part of it.
And so I knew that there was an ending, that because Robert Jordan had talked about writing
the ending, and I knew that and Harriet had confirmed the ending had been written. And so I
walked in, and it's -- it was like ten o'clock at night but I got that ending and I sat down in the
front room, sitting room, and I read what you now have as primarily the epilogue of A Memory
of Light. Almost all of the epilogue was in there.
Also contained in there were several big important scenes from the prologue which we split
among the three prologues. There are a couple of the really cool scenes in there. There was
the -- the Tower of Genji, there was a place where Gawain [phonetic] gets a special visitor,
and the -- I think it's called a cup of tea, that scene, but really it was the ending that I wanted
to read.
>> Harriet McDougal: And there's the blank in the blank.
>> Brandon Sanderson: There's the blank in the blank, yes, which is in the prologue of -- of
the Memory of Light. One of the prologue sequences. And I read all of this and read his
ending, which you now have in your hands.
And Harriet afterwards she said, well, what do you think? And I said it was satisfying. That
was my word for it. It was it was the right ending. I felt a huge sense of relief. I'm in a lot of
ways there wasn't a lot there there were 200 pages, and so it wasn't -- it wasn't huge, but at
the same time, it was a huge relief to me because the ending had been done and it had been
done right and my job then was not so impossible, because all I had to do was get from
well-written book to well-written ending without screwing it up too much.
And having that ending in hand is really what has made this possible and made it -- me able
to work on these books in a way that I really feel conformed to Robert Jordan's vision for them
because I knew where he was going. And I tend to work from an ending, that's how I write my
books is I always have the ending in mind first.
And so, that is the story of how you came to get A Memory of Light. And it has been an
awesome and daunting and horrifying and extremely hard and wonderful experience all in
one.
People like to ask, how does it feel to be done? It feels like, I can only imagine, finishing a
marathon. My wife has done one, and I -- she's talked about how finishing one feels. It's like
that. It's been a marathon of five years for me, and for a lot of us, a marathon of 23 years.
And setting down that weight has been a relief, but again, it's something I couldn't set down
until I was sure it was right. And I feel really good about what's happened. I'm very proud of
my place in this and very honored by my opportunity to work on it.
And that's what I wanted to share with you guys. That's my presentation, so to speak. But we
are going to do some questions. We have about 20 minutes left for questions. And so I'm
going to go with -- there are three hand that went up really fast, and I'm going to go ahead do
these questions go ahead.
>>: Yes. Many authors tend the write themselves into their books. I was just wondering if
Robert Jordan had done that, and in particular, if he had written himself as Rand's ter'angreal.
>> Brandon Sanderson: Had he written himself into the book? Robert Jordan did write
himself in, but it's -- it's not -- I think you're thinking of Rand's angreal that -- yes. It's actually
something else it's ter'angreal that they find in the Ebou Dar cache which is a man, a jolly
man statue that is full of stories. And that was Robert Jordan's cameo that he wrote himself
in.
>>: Okay.
>> Brandon Sanderson: Okay, will you come up and use the mic? Because then the people
who are listening can -- can hear what you have to say. They're -- they're sitting at their their
cubicles furiously producing new Microsoft products for me to write books with so --
>>: [laughter]
>>: It's a short question. Did you ever finish the book?
>> Harriet McDougal: No. But I've read --
>> Brandon Sanderson: It was a tease. I thought it was. Because you didn't say you did or
did not. But you read 47 pages but you didn't finish it, right?
>> Harriet McDougal: No.
>>: Brandon Sanderson: And still have not?
>> Harriet McDougal: But how many pages of Brandon Sanderson have I read now?
>> Brandon Sanderson: That's right.
>>: [laughter]
>> Brandon Sanderson: It was very interesting working with -- with Harriet during that first
year. She's talked about this a little, but she considered getting somebody working on the
book to be like a dying request of Robert Jordan's. And she -- once she found me and gave
me the stuff, she basically disappeared for a year. And if any of you who have lost someone
dear to you, you might understand why that was.
I worked for a year basically in seclusion, getting all the notes ready and working on the
outline and things, and it wasn't until after that year that -- that Harriet came back came on
board and, you know, she's an editor, and she needs something to work on, done, before, but
-- so she left me with it for that year, and grieved. And then that's -- that next year is when we
worked on Gathering Storm after I had worked on some prose and things.
>>: So, at the end of The Eye of the World, the all-caps voice, will we ever find out who it was
or what they were looking for?
>> Brandon Sanderson: The all-caps voice at the end of Eye of the World makes an
appearance in A Memory of Light.
>>: What about what wasn't there?
>> Brandon Sanderson: What's that?
>>: What about what wasn't there?
>> Brandon Sanderson: What do you mean what wasn't there?
>> Harriet McDougal: [laughter]
>> Brandon Sanderson: Maybe it'll be in the encyclopedia. I can raffle things, Harriet is
working on an encyclopedia of The Wheel of Time, which is coming out maybe in two years or
so.
>> Harriet McDougal: Yeah.
>>: So, I've heard you answer or explain in other interviews and, Mrs. McDougal, you
expressed your late husband's fear -- fear or not being comfortable with others writing in his
universe, but I'm still curious, did he leave notes or other bits of information about the
Outrigger novels that he had alluded to so many times?
>> Harriet McDougal: He -- about the Outrigger novels, he left -- it's either one sentence or
two sentences.
>>: Okay.
>> Harriet McDougal: And that's a major reason why they won't exist.
>>: Okay.
>> Harriet McDougal: There was not enough -- of course there are all the notes on this
series, you know. I can't tell you what he said, because for the people in the room who
haven't finished, oddly enough, there's a spoiler in there. So sure. It just couldn't be. It
wouldn't be in any way his Outriggers and I'm sorry.
>>: No, I understand that. But I appreciate the answer --
>>: Harriet McDougal: But they sounded wonderful.
>>: Thank you.
>> Harriet McDougal: You're welcome.
>>: Hi. Thanks very much for coming and doing this, appreciate it. I've been looking at some
of your -- you've done the webcasts where you record yourself writing, and something I've
noticed maybe it's just because of the thought process going on in your head, you seem to
type fairly slowly for somebody's who's written multiple thousand page novels.
>> Brandon Sanderson: Yep.
>>: Is that -- is that intentional and sort of goes along as you're thinking, or is it something
that you wish that you could speed up have you ever actually formally trained on how to type?
>> Brandon Sanderson: I can type very quickly. I can get up to I think 87 or something like
that, I work by the process. The creative process is slower than the fingers. I'm not actually a
very fast writer. I'm not a slow writer. I'm about middle of the pack. People talk about how
quickly I write. I don't write quickly. I write a lot.
I do this compulsively. I love to tell stories and one quirk of mine is that in order to take a
break from telling stories I just tell a story I'm not supposed to be telling which is where a lot of
interesting books, I'll -- I'll talk about a few of them in a few minutes, because Dwayne has
them for sale, and that's where a lot of those things come from. And so, yeah, I do not wish I
could speed up.
I -- in fact, there -- I don't even -- I don't even want to be able to read faster. I actually started
taking a speed reading class in school and the first thing they said is: You need to stop
hearing the words as you read them, in order to read faster. And I said, I don't want to stop
hearing the words. That's part of the beauty and I actually dropped that class like that. Speed
reading is not what I want I don't want to go faster through the Wheel of Time, that doesn't
make any sense. And it's the same thing with the creative process.
>>: Okay. Cool.
>> Brandon Sanderson: Uh-huh.
>>: Do you mind if I have a second question since --
>> Brandon Sanderson: It's the guys behind you. They -- they look like they're nice fellows.
>>: Thank you. Both -- I mean, Jordan didn't plan 14 books certainly, as you said, you know,
this trilogy will be good. And it's no secret that as an author he wasn't even -- no author
seems to be in complete control of their creation. It evolves. And he kept saying no more
than three more books, we're like five -- five books from the end. I think it appears like
George R. R. Martin seems to be in a similar place. Where, you know, there's this --
>>: [applause]
>>: Do you -- do you think that the experience of writing the end of Wheel of Time has given
you a different perspective that will help you with Stormlight Archive? Or do you think that
would never have been --
>> Harriet McDougal: [laughter]
>>: Or do you think that your style, you know, did you always have it plotted out that it would
never expand in that way?
>> Brandon Sanderson: It certainly could -- would expand. It does happen to all authors, but
authors do tend to fall into two general categories. George Martin has great terms for these,
so I steal his. He calls them gardeners and architects.
Gardeners, which Robert Jordan was and George Martin is, they explore their story and more
discover it as they go. Robert Jordan was actually a little bit like halfway between architect
and gardener because he would always have waypoints that he was writing toward and like
he knew the ending and things like that. Stephen King is a complete gardener. He says he
doesn't know where he's going, he just puts characters in interesting situations, starts writing.
And George R. R. Martin has said that he's a gardener.
I'm an architect. An architect is someone who plots out things beforehand and then writes
them, but even being an architect the creative process is such that if while you're working on
it, something better comes along, you have to be willing to knock down the blueprints that you
have done and -- and build them up again.
That said, I -- things have not expanded on me in the same way. People point to the last book
being split into three, but I point to my very first blog post where I made about it where I said I
was planning to to write a single 800,000-word book. And instead I wrote one -- one -- it's
about a million words. So I'm within a fairly close hit of what I initially -- eh, 200,000 words 20
percent whatever.
>>: [laughter]
>> Brandon Sanderson: But -- but yeah, I'm more like a 20 percent than expanse -- does that
make sense? And Stormlight is -- is written out as ten books --
>> Harriet McDougal: [laughter]
>> Brandon Sanderson: -- and I honestly think that it will hit that, two five-book arcs for those
who are wondering, I think it will hit that. But we'll see. I have not -- never done something
this long before on my own, so.
>>: Thank you. Thank you.
>>: Two questions, short questions. First, I was looking through the leaflet, why is Romanda
wanted in Far Madding?
>>: [laughter]
>> Brandon Sanderson: Harriet?
>> Harriet McDougal: I haven't a clue.
>>: [laughter]
>>: Good answer, all right. And second question, without being too terribly spoileriffic, what's
the one thing you wanted to find out ended?
>> Brandon Sanderson: There is an event in the epilogue that -- that one of the characters
performed something that seems impossible by our understanding, and Robert Jordan did not
explain how or why.
>>: That's fair. All right. Got my own fan theories and they'll just stay there. Thanks.
>> Brandon Sanderson: Uh-huh.
>>: I actually do have a spoiler question, and I don't know --
>> Brandon Sanderson: Okay, why don't you save that till afterward and come ask us.
>>: Okay. But I do want to say that your answer to his question there makes a whole lot
more sense now that -- you didn't know --
>> Brandon Sanderson: I do not know either.
>>: Okay.
>>: [laughter]
>> Brandon Sanderson: Sorry. When I say he wrote the epilogue, he wrote the epilogue and
he left notes on a lot of things but he didn't leave notes on the things he'd already finished,
because we didn't need to know how to write those.
>>: So, this is a question expanding on the whole garden versus architect thing.
>> Brandon Sanderson: Uh-huh.
>>: You say that you're an architect.
>> Brandon Sanderson: Yes.
>>: Now that -- not a Wheel of Time question, actually -- but your non-Wheel of Time works
have this whole meta world connecting them --
>> Brandon Sanderson: Yes.
>>: The star world and --
>> Brandon Sanderson: Uh-huh.
>>: -- and stuff. Where do you think you're going to go with that now that you have --
>> Brandon Sanderson: Oh I can tell you where I'm going to go with that. I'm not sure how
much I can say. For those who don't know, my epics are all connected. There are continuing
characters through Elantris into Mistborn into Warbreaker into Way of Kings. It's behind the
scenes sort of thing, it's not something you don't need to read them in order. It's not
something you need to know in order to to read one of the books but there are continuing
characters.
And I have a grand arc for what is going on it has to do with my original pitch to my editor on
the Mistborn trilogy, which was actually a trilogy of trilogies way back in 2005 when I told him
about it, I wanted to do three trilogies, one past, one present, one future. And I wanted to do
an epic fantasy trilogy which really explored kind of mythology and magic; and then a modern
day trilogy in which the epic fantasy had become the foundations of myth and religion for a
trilogy set in about a 1980s level technology; and then I wanted to do a far-future science
fiction in which the magic which had gone through all of the other books became the means
by which space exploration became possible, and the foundation of technology, particularly
faster than light technology. And so that is a -- a core spine of the greater story that I'm
telling.
>>: I love Wheel of Time, but please do that too. That sounds amazing.
>>: [laughter]
>>: All right. So, you mentioned earlier that you have a tendency to write books you're not
supposed to write --
>> Brandon Sanderson: Yes.
>>: -- to kind of take a break.
>> Brandon Sanderson: Uh-huh.
>>: I assume a couple of those were like Alloy of Law and Legion.
>> Brandon Sanderson: Legion was one, yep.
>>: So, I really liked those books but it seems kind of mean of you to leave so many
unresolved plot threads.
>>: [laughter]
>>: Any chance we'll get anything there?
>> Brandon Sanderson: Yeah, Legion I actually wrote as a television show pitch, was the
idea for it, pitch a series. And I immediately sold it to Lionsgate. And so we'll see. It's always
hard to say what will happen in Hollywood because there's so much moving there and to get
the pieces in place to make a show of a movie just takes so much work. But -- but I'm hopeful
that you will see more there. I am doing more with Alloy of Law I'll explain that in a minute.
Okay?
>>: Thank you.
>> Brandon Sanderson: Yep.
>>: So, you already spoke how daunting taking over the Wheel of Time is and how -- what an
extensive series it is. One of the most impressive and interesting things to me in it is there's I
believe 1700 named characters.
>> Brandon Sanderson: Yes, 2500.
>>: 2500. That's even more than I thought.
>> Brandon Sanderson: It's crazy.
>>: What is a fantasy author -- since you can't just look in the phone book or something to
grab a name --
>> Brandon Sanderson: Right.
>>: How do you find your inspiration for names for characters?
>> Brandon Sanderson: It really depends on the book I'm writing. For some of my books I
use interesting linguistic quirks that interest me. I've taken a number of linguistic classes and
so for instance from Warbreaker I use just something simple like repeating consonant sounds,
so we ended up with Viviana and Sesebron to give a theme to some of the name. In Way of
Kings, symmetry is holy and so I use palindromes or one letter off palindromes as names.
And that's where a lot of names came from in there.
From Wheel of Time, Robert Jordan actually did look in the phonebook. The reason for this
being is he wanted to harken to our world with The Wheel of Time implying the Wheel of Time
is perhaps our world in the future or in the past, and so he wanted names that felt like names
of people you knew but changed a little bit, and this is where things like Thom came from,
with -- spelled with an "H" or Mat with -- you know all of this stuff.
And so he would go through the phonebook looking for common names and tweak them. And
so for Wheel of Time naming, I got lists of -- of names. I just had fans names and I just used
these names and tweaked them in order to try and get the same style and feel of naming.
One trick, if you're having trouble with this, that a lot of writers use, that they will pick a
geographic area in our world and they will base the names of of those -- that geographic
names, like they'll say, like, I've used actually ancient Persian. I'm like ancient Persian
names, sure. And then I'll go and look at those and I will change them to -- to fit my
characters. But that way, everyone from the same region has a similar naming paradigm. So,
there's all sorts of things that you can do.
>>: Thank you. That was the most informative explanation of naming I've heard.
>> Brandon Sanderson: Yeah.
>>: Hi. Brandon, I know that you're a pretty big cheerleader of e-books --
>> Brandon Sanderson: Yes.
>>: -- and you too have had some discussions over the years about e-books. Could you just
take a minute to talk about how specifically the e-books for these three novels kind of --
>> Brandon Sanderson: Yeah. Harriet has been in publishing a very long time and
understands publishing for a very long time, and e-books have kind of blindsided all of us.
And as she said earlier, and I just talked about, I swim in the net.
>> Harriet McDougal: Yes.
>> Brandon Sanderson: And Harriet does not.
>> Harriet McDougal: He has gills.
>> Brandon Sanderson: Uh-huh.
>> Harriet McDougal: He's very much at home in the e-world.
>> Brandon Sanderson: Harriet early on with the books was under the impression that
e-books were like the paperback, that you release the hardcover and then a year later, you
release the e-book and the paperback. And she was under the impression that that was how
it would work, and it's come as a surprise to many in the publishing industry that it doesn't
work that way.
>> Harriet McDougal: And let us talk about the elephant in the middle of the room, which is
the window oppose -- for A Memory of Light, the e-book won't be out until the beginning of
April, a three-month window. That is -- and that was my doing.
And I did it for the bookstores. I love bookstores. Bookstores are a vanishing breed. They're
just going even, I understand Barnes and Noble is talking about closing half their stores. This,
to a freak like me who just really has a thing for paper and bindings, is very ominous and sad.
And I wanted to give the bookstores a break. Bookstores have been very good to Robert
Jordan, all his career. And that's why there's a window.
>> Brandon Sanderson: I've been trying very hard to find ways that we could blend this.
Because I really like books too. In fact, I'm a big fan of a lot of independent booksellers.
You'll notice I went to them on tour. Dwayne's bookstore U books [phonetic] is one of my
favorites.
>> Harriet McDougal: Yeah.
>> Brandon Sanderson: Borderlands in San Francisco and Mysterious Galaxies down in San
Diego. These bookstores -- these are places that supported me when I was brand new.
These -- these bookstores that have a focus on genre, you know you -- you would call some
big bookstores and they'd be like, who are you? We're not interested. These bookstores are
like, hey, a new author, we want to meet you. Come and we will bring in our readers and we
will let you -- you talk to them and things like that, and it's a completely different experience.
And whereas small genre like science fiction and fantasy, these stores mean a lot to us.
Because, you know, the personal at Costco is not going to read our books and sell our books.
But Dwayne does. And you can go to Dwayne and you can say say hay what have you read
lately or what are people excited about and he'll say I read this, it's good. Or this guy came
and he was really nice, and here's what his book is about, and things like that.
And that is something in the small genres that I feel we're going to be clobbered by the
vanishing of bookstores, when people like John Grisham are not going to have to worry about
it as much. And so one of the things I've been trying to do is work out a you buy the hard
copy, either the paperback or hardcover, the print copy, and you get the e-book for free.
That's one of the things that I'm trying to do and so my -- my latest two -- oh --
>>: [applause]
>> Brandon Sanderson: Thank you. My latest two smaller releases last year, Legion and
Emperor's Soul, I actually will mail you the e-book of those two. If you buy the hard copy, and
you send me an email, we will respond with a DRM3 version in multiple formats that you can
just read on any e-reader that you want.
And so that's just something I'm trying and I'm trying to use this as data points to convince Tor
to let me do this for my larger books for which they own the e-book price. The small books I
was able to retain them on, but that's not something viable for a big release like a Stormlight
Archive book or something like that. And so it's something I'm hoping we can convince them
to let me start doing with my other books.
So, we'll do these two last questions and then I'll talk a little bit more about books that we
have for sale, and then we will bid you farewell.
>>: Okay. I'll be quick. Just first things both of y'all again this has been an amazing
adventure. Question is: So, is there any chance or is the door open for the Wheel of Time
story to be told in other forms of media, so like movie or television sometime in the future?
>> Harriet McDougal: The motion picture rights have been sold to Universal, and they are
working on development of The Eye of the World as a first movie. I am told that they're
working on a second draft of the script. I haven't seen word one.
>>: Awesome. Thank you.
>>: Actually, similar question, though slightly broader scope, so Robert Jor -- well I should
say the Wheel of Time computer game came out mid-90s, personally wasn't too fond of it, but
I'm hoping that other computer games and things like that based on that world will come out,
any plans for that, is signed publishing --
>> Harriet McDougal: The game rights with forgive me, I think they're doing business as
Manatherin [phonetic]. They were Red Eagle. It's the same people. It's just a change of the
moniker. And they're working on it.
>>: You know that -- we haven't heard any press about it. Is there any details available on
the net or?
>> Harriet McDougal: I don't know.
>> Brandon Sanderson: Not that we know. No -- no major movement right now
>>: And last, when's your Mistborn computer game scheduled to come out?
>> Brandon Sanderson: Mistborn we pushed back until 2014 because we worried that we
don't have specifics about the potential new console releases in 2013, and we figured we
would rather be -- a lot of you are like, hmm, I can't say anything.
>>: [laughter]
>> Brandon Sanderson: We figured we would rather be a newer title on the new consoles
than a title that got lost in the shuffle of all the hype about a potential 720 or things like that,
so.
>>: Sound reasoning. Thank you.
>> Brandon Sanderson: All right. So, by way of farewell to everyone, there's just a few things
I want to say. First off, if anyone's watching or anyone here, my website is
BrandonSanderson.com, and if you actually go on there and click on the Warbreaker -- I need
a new website, by the way. I'm sorry, my website's antiquated -- but you click on the little gem
that says Warbreaker, you can download Warbreaker, one of my novels, for free. And again,
[indiscernible] free. It's a free sample. It's a complete epic fantasy. It's -- I released it
in 2009, I think. So, it's a standalone and I would recommend that to you, and I thank you
guys all for listening.
The other things I want to promote, we'll have Dwayne hold them up over there, if you would.
We have copies of both Legion and The Emperor's Soul -- or we sold out?
>>: We're out of Legion.
>> Brandon Sanderson: Okay, well we have copies of The Emperor's Soul. The Emperor's
Soul is one of the breather novels I did between books last year. It is a novella. It's about 200
pages. It's set in the same world as Elantris but it stands on its own. It uses different
characters. If you've never tried anything of mine, it's actually a really good place to start
because it is so short but it does all the things that I love to do, really interesting magic
system, kind of approaches fantasy from my -- I think you'll really like it.
I think it's the strongest piece of short fiction I've ever done. It's about a woman who is hired
to create a forgery of the soul of the emperor. He's been wounded in the head left as a
vegetable and they want her -- his -- his people want her to create a duplicate soul to stick in
there so they can pretend he's still around.
Okay, and you have the Legion back of the store. Legion is another one. What else do you
have back there, Dwayne, do you have -- we don't have any Wheel of Time back stock, but
we have Alloy of Law? They're gone, okay.
>>: [laughter]
>>: All I have left here right now is two and three of Mistborn.
>> Brandon Sanderson: Two and three of Mistborn, okay.
>>: [laughter]
>> Brandon Sanderson: And Emperor's Soul. Really, if you haven't tried that one, give that a
try. I will be hanging around for a little bit longer signing books. Harriet will as well. So thank
you guys for welcoming us in.
>>: [applause]