Four Secret Novels by Brandon Sanderson
kickstarter.com
kickstarter.com
I was certain he is announcing he's working with a team of ghost writers given his extraordinary writing speed.
He seems very disciplined.
Hate to say but I'm glad I'm not one of his kids. He wakes up around noon and then writes for five hours, and _then_ he hangs out with his family. So basically his kids don't see him all day until shortly before they go to bed.
This sounds like an awesome schedule. Sleep in, work for a very reasonable number of hours, and then have plenty of energy left to hang out with your kids (somewhat earlier than most commuters get home).
I probably shouldn’t express my personal opinion here. To each their own!
Frankly, this sounds like a lot of focused family time:
""" At 5:00 I stop, and 5:00 until 10:00 is family time for me. And that is walled off. I don’t work on books, even in the back of my brain. It’s got to be a really steep wall for me to make sure I am there for them. And I have to mentally say, “You are there for them.” When your kids ask you to do something, that’s the time you say, “Yes, I’m going to go do that.” """
But sure yeah, that’s some good focused time at the end there.
I regret making my original comment.
And how is 5PM "shortly before bed"?
The context is everyone at home during covid, by the way. And the context of my comment was assuming the child’s perspective.
So yes, you can negotiate in bad faith. At which point it basically becomes a forced delay before you can show it to anyone else. But if you do that you'll probably earn a bad reputation in the industry...
On the other hand I've been put off by the pacing of the last three books. It feels like the basic structure is that there's a build up to a huge conflict at the end of the book, and the vast majority of the pages are spent waiting for it to arrive. In my opinion, the second book, Words of Radiance, was the best so far in terms of balancing character, plot and action.
On the other hand, the Stormlight magic system involves "grain" and "blood" being fundamental elemental substances.
I've been enjoying a story that manages to have 22 elements - including Healing, Blood, Sound, Force, Destruction, Illusion and Fae - integral to its system of magic in a way that feels consistent while being varied and interesting, despite how odd some of those seem at first. Grain does seem a pretty strange element I agree, but so did Wood when I started reading stories using the Chinese five element scheme until I became accustomed to it.
But I came years later and found the series quite good and very enjoyable.
I think Elantris is his best. It's just that there's less of it (one book) than there is of the big series.
You're free to dislike the books, but this is an extremely unfair characterization. Sanderson's books bear very little resemblance to Tolkien's beyond the genre and the elaborate nature of the worldbuilding.
Sanderson's refusal to have characters ever actually curse is just infuriating.
Most all profanity in our language can in some way be traced back to a religious context. It would the make sense that on other worlds with totally different religious backgrounds they would use different cursing.
In fact his usage of this concept is so subtle that you can detect what characters are from the world and which ones aren't by whether they use damnation as a noun or an adjective.
He teaches at BYU as well (still).
https://monsterhunternation.com/2021/05/17/why-are-there-so-...
I'm genuinely interested - for someone new to his work, where is a good book to start?
Edit: as mentioned in other comments: https://www.brandonsanderson.com/where-do-i-start/
Mistborn is my favorite trilogy ever. I've read it multiple times and I know the plot very well. The reason I love it is the characters. They feel so real, and you get genuinely invested in their growth through the books.
One-line description from the website: It’s a hybrid epic fantasy heist story with a focus on political intrigue and powerful action scenes.
This isn't really a "kickstarter campaign" - it's a preorder which is for whatever reason being organized through kickstarter. Kickstarter shows a disclaimer that says "you may never receive anything", but the odds of that happening here are 0%.
If you prefer novellas/standalone to get a feel, I'd recommend "Emperor's Soul" and "Warbreaker". He's known for good magic system and Sanderlanche (things coming together at the end in a hurry).
I went on a binge read when I started reading his work about 4-5 years back. I still enjoy his books, but I'd recommend giving gaps between books. As they say "Too much of anything is bad".
I appreciate your question here is genuine, rather than critical. But just a reminder of the guidelines [1]:
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
(And I'm commenting here as someone who's never read this author, i.e. not speaking defensively.)
* Start with the Mistborn trilogy. This series probably has the best magic system he ever designed, and they're not as long as the main opus magnum that is the Stormlight Archive series, so if you don't like them, you can discover that much more quickly. It also gives you probably the best window into the general writing style of Sanderson, I believe.
* The next book is probably Stormlight Archive book 1, The Way of Kings. If you liked the Mistborn trilogy, reading this book next is probably the right thing to do to know if you're going to be invested into the entire shared literary universe or if you just want to stick to some series.
* After this point, it's probably best to read the books closer to their original publication order. In particular, the Stormlight Archive books start drawing on the other Cosmere novels so that familiarity with them is helpful, although definitely by book 4 (Rhythm of War), it's necessary to be familiar with Mistborn's magic system for maximum enjoyment.
* The thing with starting with Elantris is that Elantris is Sanderson's first novel, and it that really comes across in the writing. For that reason, I'd move it away from a general publication order recommendation.
* Another reason to generally favor publication order is that the wiki actually lets you browse it as it was right before the major books were published (https://coppermind.net/wiki/Special:TimeMachine), which lets you use it to catch up on information in reading the newer books without spoiling them for you.
It was handled well.
I feel like I’m missing something here, or maybe everyone else is just way more of a Sanderson fan than I am ;)
First, Brandon planned this well. He made a video Monday heavily implying bad news. For loyal fans waiting a day to hear the news caused quite a stir I assume. Then making such a huge unexpected announcement the next day caught many people off guard.
Second, announcing four new books is not common! Especially considering he wrote them while working on many other books over the last two years. I think people are just excited and happy to share something positive.