I’m still down here in Southern Utah, but the hotel has interment access, so I figured it was time to get off my duff and post something. (Well, actually, I’m still sitting on my duff as I post, but you get the idea.) I don’t know if I mentioned, but some friends of mine flew in from the east coast, and we came down here to do some hiking and hit the Shakespeare festival. We just got back from Twelfth Night, and it was awesome. A wonderfully done production of the play, which is one of my favorites.

I’ve got a real soft spot for the Shakespearean farce, which may be why you see elements of such ‘mistaken identity’ plots in both of my published books. (Raoden’s guise as Kaloo; Vin’s guise as Valette.) Warbreaker is more of an intentional nod to this genre, with the characters, dialogue, and situation more amusing in places. However, one thing I like best about what Shakespeare did was how he often managed to mix real emotion, drama, and some depth of theme into each of his farces.

Anyway, I’m off for family reunion number three this weekend, which also constitutes camping trip number two of the three that I’m forced to endure this year. 😉 Hopefully, I survive. Until then, here’s the full first section of FINAL EMPIRE PRIME for those of you who are keeping up on my posts of pre-Mistborn foundational material. Once again, this is old stuff, and never made it past the rough draft stage. I scrapped the project and combined it with MISTBORN PRIME, started over from the beginning, and ended up with MISTBORN: THE FINAL EMPIRE.

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In this chapter, we see the first appearance of ‘The Conqueror’ who eventually became ‘The Lord Ruler.’ In FINALE EMPIRE PRIME, he was a viewpoint character. I eventually decided to distance myself from him so that I could keep more secrets about his past. In addition, in Mistborn, I wanted to focus on Kelsier’s crew, and didn’t really have the space for a series of contemplative chapters from the Lord Ruler’s viewpoint.

In here, we can also see some talk of the magic system for the book—which was, unfortunately, one of the chunks of this book that just didn’t work. Though I salvaged a little piece of the worldbuilding and turned it into Feruchemy, most of the magic in this novel as it stood needed to be tossed aside, with Allomancy deservingly taking its place.

Please remember that MISTBORN: THE FINAL EMPIRE is out in paperback as of this week! First month sales on a book are very important, so if you’ve been thinking of buying a copy, now’d be a great time!